Web Search, meet Sourcetable

Eoin McMillan -

Have you ever wanted to search the entirety of all publicly published human knowledge at your fingertips?

Sourcetable now offers a variety of Web Search tools from within the spreadsheet to help with tasks like online research, data enrichment, web scraping, checking finance data, and more. Web Search was a commonly requested user feature, and is much more pleasant in a unified interface than via multi-tab browsing flows that typically involve bouncing around between ChatGPT, Google and spreadsheets.

This "web search" release bundles multiple tools that are accessible on demand. By default, Sourcetable's cognition engine selects the appropriate web tool based on your instruction. You can also request the AI specific tools directly if you know what to ask for.

Web Search in Sourcetable

Web Search tools

  • 🔍 Web Search: Ask for information on a person, place or thing, and Sourcetable will do online research for you and return useful information. It's like using Google and ChatGPT right inside your spreadsheet.
  • 📈 Yahoo Finance: Sourcetable can retrieve the latest stock price or historical information on U.S. and major global financial stocks and indices.
  • 🐍 Web Scraping (Python Requests, BeautifulSoup, Selenium & cURL): Sourcetable's AI has a virtual python machine under the hood. These are just some of the scraping and data retrieval tools available at your disposal. This means that you can scrape a URL on request, parse HTML, retrieve data, and harness the capability of these tools without writing a line of code.
  • 🕸️ "the Index": When people talk about AI these days, they are mostly referring to Large Language Models (LLMs) that are trained on the web. Their training cutoffs can be a little older, but the good news is that these models are extremely comprehensive and powerful. Use Sourcetable's Command Bar to leverage the AI Index and enrich 1,000s of rows of data at a time!

Tips and Limitations:

  • If you want the output in a table, ask for the output to be in a table. It can be helpful to define column headers ahead of time, and to ask the AI for ideas.
  • Web Search, and the associated tools, are AI driven. This means you can be more descriptive in what you want, and how you want data returned.
  • If you have a long instruction, use voice input to improve Web Search output.
  • Web Scraping is currently not great at handling pagination or complex web pages. If the web page doesn't require clicking or scrolling to reveal lazy-loading information, you should be able to retrieve all available information.
  • Pro tip: Want to use a specific web tool but not sure what to ask for? Ask Sourcetable which tools are available to complete your task!

Web Search tools are available to all users on the Free and Pro plans.

Enjoy!