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Automate Niche Research with Wikipedia, GPT-4o-mini, and Google Sheets

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Created by: Ian Kerins || iankerins

Ian Kerins

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Last update 21 hours ago

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Overview

This n8n template automates the process of researching niche topics. It searches for a topic on Wikipedia, scrapes the relevant page using ScrapeOps, extracts the history or background section, and uses AI to generate a concise summary and timeline. The results are automatically saved to Google Sheets for easy content planning.

Who is this for?

  • Content Creators: Quickly gather background info for videos or articles.
  • Marketers: Research niche markets and product histories.
  • Educators/Students: Generate timelines and summaries for study topics.
  • Researchers: Automate the initial data gathering phase.

What problems it solves

  • Time Consumption: Manually reading and summarizing Wikipedia pages takes time.
  • Blocking: Scraping Wikipedia directly can sometimes lead to IP blocks; ScrapeOps handles this.
  • Unstructured Data: Raw HTML is hard to use; this workflow converts it into a clean, structured format (JSON/CSV).

How it works

  1. Define Topic: You set a keyword in the workflow.
  2. Locate Page: The workflow queries the Wikipedia API to find the correct page URL.
  3. Smart Scraping: It uses the ScrapeOps Proxy API to fetch the page content reliably.
  4. Extraction: A code node intelligently parses the HTML to find "History", "Origins", or "Background" sections.
  5. AI Processing: GPT-4o-mini summarizes the text and extracts key dates for a timeline.
  6. Storage: The structured data is appended to a Google Sheet.

Setup steps (~ 5-10 minutes)

  1. ScrapeOps Account:
    • Register for a free API key at ScrapeOps.
    • Configure the ScrapeOps Scraper node with your API key.
  2. OpenAI Account:
    • Add your OpenAI credentials to the Message a model node.
  3. Google Sheets:
    • Create a Google Sheet. You can duplicate this Template Sheet (copy the headers).
    • Connect your Google account to the Append row in sheet node and select your new sheet.

Pre-conditions

  • An active ScrapeOps account.
  • An OpenAI API key (or another LLM credential).
  • A Google account for Sheets access.

Disclaimer

This template uses ScrapeOps as a community node. You are responsible for complying with Wikipedia's Terms of Use, robots directives, and applicable laws in your jurisdiction. Scraping targets may change at any time; adjust render/scroll/wait settings and parsers as needed. Use responsibly for legitimate business purposes.