topic Re: Open website literally through home automation in Home Automation

Open website literally through home automation

w3rn3r — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:22:01 GMT

Hi Community,

I hope someone, anyone of you can help or shed some light on this...

The question is: what is the right way to make an automation open a website on my Google Nest Hub.
In other words, make it literally do what I told it to do and not mix in own "intelligence"?

Here's what happening:
I've created an Household Home Automation with an Action that opens my website's home page (for instance) mrgren.nl (so, note: not "green", but "gren").

This is the automation action:
open https://mrgren.nl (this should open fine bc it resolves fine).

This will trigger a server side php on my webserver (on the internet), that fetches the "current solar power" from my solar power system (load time < 100ms) and puts it on the screen as HTML.

This worked great(!) for a couple of days (approximately a week?).

After that, it started to fail. Instead of specifically/literally do what I programmed (as it did before), it now starts living its own life. It makes a google search out of it (and comes up with crazy results).

It is not taking the website domain/url as literal input but uses it tries to reason it by using its own "intelligence". What is should do: open the browser and show the https:/mrgren.nl home page.

What it actually does:

1. It opens the browser, and opens linkedin to search for "Mr Green" (I mean: "LINKEDIN???". Thinks it's a person, tries some -seemingly random- person registry? WHY? There's not even a valid login cookie for linkedin.com, whyyyyy does it do this anyway :-))) ?);
2. it would say "I can't cast anything, you should give instruction blah blah"...;
3. it says "I've looked up pages containing Mr Gren... please find some examples here";
4. it says "I've looked up pages containing Mr Green... please find some examples here";
5. it opens the browser and opens the page "mrgren.com";
6. it opens the browser and opens the page "mrgreen.nl";
7. it even opens the browser and opens the page "mistergreen.nl"...

Not good, pretty annoying. Why is this happening and how do I tell it to do as I programmed it to do? Or is this (still) not possible and won't be possible like for ever?

Fuchsia version 18.20240225.3.63
Software version 58.102.2.613521407
FW version Chromecast 3.73.411796

I'm located in The Netherlands, and the Nest Hub's language is set to Dutch - should not be an issue I hope (although the Dutch seem to be very stubborn also 🙂 ).

Thanks for the help!

PS: not using actual names, you get the picture I hope.

Re: Open website literally through home automation

JSUK2 — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:57:00 GMT

Also got the same issue. I would like Google Home Automations to open an exact webpage eg ..../lightstatus1.php. But I cannot get it working.

Re: Open website literally through home automation

kirimayne — Thu, 15 May 2025 13:38:18 GMT

Your situation with the Nest Hub really resonated with me, especially the part where it starts interpreting things on its own instead of doing what it's told — I've run into similar issues trying to automate displays at home. If you're aiming for more precise control over website behavior and performance, something like why website builders are bad really helped me rethink my approach. It dives deep into how proper custom development offers not just flexibility but real consistency — exactly what's missing in these quirky automations. After working with a tailored solution based on those ideas, I’ve had far fewer unexpected behaviors and a more streamlined setup overall

Re: Open website literally through home automation

charlesy — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:02:05 GMT

+1 for this problem. I want to write a script that tells a Google Home screen to open a specific URL, not have it search and give me its best guess of the URL.

We need assistant.command.browseWebPage or device.command.browseWebPage

At the moment there's only assistant.command.OkGoogle, which launches a search that either changes the URL or can't find it at all.

I can't believe it doesn't exist already but apparently it doesn't.