Last month I made a tool called the Temporary Obsessions Feed Reader (you can see my writeup here.) The TOFR is a Google Sheets-based tool that lets you schedule your RSS feeds and give them expiration dates. This is a powerful feature when you combine it with keyword-based RSS feeds. I have used TOFR for […]
Local Search America: Search the Web by DMA
Today I finished creating Local Search America, a new way to create specific search spaces for authoritative institutions in American DMAs. Enter a city/state. LSA identifies television stations and government agencies which serve that area as well as institutions of higher education in that area. Up to 25 of those sites can be bundled into a Google search (using Google’s site: operator.)
Building Spaces for Local Search Using DMA
As Google’s web search continues to be boring and filled with AI weirdness (I would have no problem if it were boring *and worked*), I continue on my mission to demonstrate that there are a lot more ways we could be building search spaces. I spent the last few days building datasets for it, then […]
Browse 660 US TV Stations by State/Metro Area and View Recent Content
I made a new site because there’s a lot of information warfare going on and I wasn’t aware of any place to find content from *only* FCC-licensed television stations. So presenting Local News TV – browse 660 US television stations by state and metro area and view recent broadcast content via YouTube. Super simple to […]
ResearchBuzz Firehose Turns 10
I started ResearchBuzz in 1998 after finishing the 2nd edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research. As time went by I started feeling the lack of organization. I was linking to and looking at lots and lots of resources, but I was posting them in aggregate newsletters which made specific resources tough to find. […]
No Kings TV
EDIT: No Kings TV is up at https://searchtweaks.com/nkt/ . I’ve done the initial sweep of the top 20 markets and after finding all the RSS I could I’ve got 73 resources listed. More will be added as I go through the resources listed in US Local News Search, but I need to let my brain […]
RSS With An Expiration Date: The Temporary Obsessions Feed Reader
I love RSS; I literally couldn’t do my self-appointed job without it. But when it comes to temporarily monitoring topics, RSS feeds are a bit unwieldy; you have to add another layer of workflow to add/remove feeds, set up reminders for yourself, etc. All that has hitherto discouraged me from using RSS when there was […]
Introducing MiniGladys for Fast Wikipedia-Based Search and Research
As you might imagine, I do a lot of web search in the course of my day. Often these queries are quick reference lookups; I need to find a company’s social media, for example, or I want to see how to spell someone’s name. Unfortunately these kinds of searches on Google are being met more […]
Wikipedia Seismograph: Using Date-Based News Search to Avoid Puff Pieces
I’ve been following the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni situation. Lately it’s strayed into PR / crisis management. One of the commentary channels I listen to mentioned today that celebrities might put out tons of stories and puff pieces to “push down” less-flattering results in Google searches. But that won’t work with Wikipedia Seismograph! WS […]
What’s Going on With Dick York’s Wikipedia Page?
Wikipedia Hot Topics has handed me a mystery. The site takes one of Wikipedia’s daily top 1000 article lists and reorganizes it by recent increases in page views (as opposed to overall page views). The reordered list provides an overview from Wikipedia, page view information, links to date-bounded Google News searches for the page’s most-visited […]