I’ve been thinking lately about using AI to aggregate and respond to current/contextual information as it seems to me that’s a better use of it than something as general as Web search. With Web search the AI requires a lot of contextual understanding and common sense which it doesn’t have, so you end up with […]
Web Search Where AI Is The Condiment And Not the Main Course
One of the reasons I’m not a big fan of AI search is that it doesn’t seem granular enough to me. That is to say, there’s not a lot of back-and-forth, patron interview type stuff so the AI is left to do a substantial amount of heavy lifting in the form of inferring all the […]
Making My Dream RSS Feed Reader
I’m continually thinking about ways to better find and curate content. Part of this is just a general desire to improve but part of it is because the social media is constantly shifting and tools are always coming and going.
With or without ancillary tools, RSS feeds have been an essential part of my efforts for decades now (I started learning about them in early 2000.) Lately — maybe in the last few years — I’ve started leaning on RSS even harder.
Machine-Visioning Match Game With Anthropic’s API
Sometimes as I’m learning JavaScript I feel stuck, like I’m spinning my wheels and not learning much. When that happens I tend to pick something low-stakes and silly to do to gain new skills — like maybe applying Anthropic’s machine vision API to old Match Game episodes?
SearchTweaks.com Updated
I’m getting everything ready for my APRA Wisconsin presentation on Wednesday, where I’ll be discussing how to use three of my web sites — SearchTweaks.com, WikiTwister.com, and MegaGladys.com . To that end I spent this morning updating SearchTweaks, changing some things around and killing some bugs. Unfortunately the local news search is going to stay […]
US Local News Search, Now With TV Stations, Newspapers, *and* NPR Member Stations
I’m still working to add new sources to the United States Local News Search ( https://searchtweaks.com/lns/ ). It started with just TV stations and then I added newspapers. I’ve now added a third source: NPR member stations. In addition, I’ve done some cleaning and polishing and the program’s easier to use. US Local News Search […]
US Local News Search Gets State Newspapers
I’ve been continuing work on my US Local News search because I’m sick of trying to find news online and getting whatever slop someone managed to slip into a search engine’s index. When I want local news I want LOCAL NEWS, not junk! I’ve just finished a new version and I’m pleased to share it […]
Wikipedia Articles As Containers Holding Intra-Wiki Link Elements: Turning Those Into Search Queries
My thinking about Web search and making the most useful query possible has focused a lot recently on the idea of query-as-cloud-of-topics; instead of thinking about George Washington as a singular search terms you might think of him as a structure encompassing every possible way you can contextually describe George Washington – dentures, cherry trees, […]
Honest-to-goodness LOCAL NEWS search, thanks to the FCC database
Searching Google for news stories is like spinning a roulette wheel nowadays: there’s no telling what you’re going to land on. Are you going to get a thoughtfully-crafted article from a local outlet, or are you going to get some flotsam from a scrape-and-spit infosewage generator or some spun-up propaganda from an information warfare site? […]
MastoGizmos Gets An Overhaul
I had a very productive Labor Day weekend. I finally got WikiTwister figured out, and last night I finished upgrading MastoGizmos ( https://mastogizmos.com/ )! MastoGizmos is a collection of 11 search tools to explore Mastodon. (You do not have to have a Mastodon account to use any of these tools.) There are tools for hashtag […]