Automator: Using Cmd F in a "watch me do" and trying to make decisions based on the results
Automator's "Watch Me Do" functionality is pretty limited, as you've discovered. Additionally, imitating how a user might go about something isn't always the best way to automate things — for example, the computer doesn't need to open up a browser window and use the find panel to search the text of a webpage, it can just download the data and search it without need for any of the GUI niceties.

Automator Email Notifications for Matching Text on a Site


Add a Get Specified URLs action. Add to it the address of the page you want to check.
Add a Get Text from Webpage action and make sure the dropdown is set to plain text.
Add a Run Shell Script action, with the shell set to /bin/bash and the input setting to to stdin. Enter the following text, replacing search term with the text you want to match (be sure to keep the quotes if the string has spaces):

grep -o "search term" | wc -l | tr -d " "


Note that the search is case sensitive.
Add a Run AppleScript action, and insert the following text, replacing me@example.com as appropriate:

on run {input, parameters}
    if input &gt; 0 then
        tell application "Mail"
            set theNewMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:"Found Matches", content:"Found " &amp; input &amp; " matches", visible:false}
            tell theNewMessage
                make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:"me@example.com"}
                send
            end tell
        end tell
    end if
end run


You can replace the subject and content, but be sure to properly format them as AppleScript strings (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, it's fairly easy to figure out, Google if necessary).


That will send an email if there are any matches for the string on the site. The AppleScript is used instead of Automator's email actions because Automator doesn't offer any conditional (i.e. if statements) means of performing actions, and we only want to send an email if a match was found. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.