SearchLink gets a little smarter

I find SearchLink to be one of my most useful Services to date. I don’t even use the Auto-Link command from the Markdown Service Tools anymore. In case you haven’t seen it yet, it allows you to quickly enter simple markers in your text and then automatically run various types of web searches and insert the top result as a Markdown link automatically. It saves a ton of time when you’re linking lists of apps, adding definitions, referencing iTunes and Last.fm artists and much more.

The only problem I’ve run into is if I run it once on a block of text, then again on another block of text, I get overlapping reference markers in my Markdown. This update fixes that.

The installation and usage are the same, and you can find all of the instructions and documentation on the original SearchLink post. The only difference is that it now adds a random 4-digit string before the reference titles in addition to checking to make sure it’s not overlapping any existing markers.

The 4-digit string will be the same for all of the links created at the time it’s run, but the next run will create a new prefix. The numbers are followed by a dash and a counter so it’s easy to visually find the related link in the text if you need to make corrections.

You can disable this prefixing, if you want to, by opening the Service in Automator and setting the prefix_random variable at the top of the script to false.

I hope you find SearchLink as useful as I do!