When I first started learning JavaScript I told my husband it was like learning LEGO. When I learned a major skill, like using fetch, it was like getting a new brick to play with. At the beginning I couldn’t make much because I didn’t have many bricks, but as I’ve learned more and found new tools and tried new things I’ve aggregated a whole collection of building materials. It’s great!
Recently I got a big big BIG brick: I learned (via experimenting and mucking around) how to use APIs to enhance datasets. After that I grabbed CISA’s official list of .gov sites from GitHub and used the Nominatim API to add a lat/long to each listing. That enhanced dataset is the heart of CivicRadius Search, a new way to find and search American government web sites. Instead of searching with keywords, you search using city/state and radius, and the results are displayed on a map. Let me show you how it works. CivicRadius Search is free to use and free of ads.
Start by looking for a city/state; the city search autocompletes. The list of cities comes from the cities represented in the CISA government sites list, so it’s not complete; do not expect to find every tiny little town in America. Next, specify a radius which can be set to miles or kilometers.
After that come the search options. Each government web site you find on the map is searchable on Google. Here’s where you set the query options. Search as you normally would on Google (except don’t use the site: operator.) There’s a set of radio buttons to set a time filter; I set it up so it’s easy to both get information on current events and do historical research.
I wanted to see what local government response to Tropical Storm Chantal was, so I did a search for sites with in 20-mile radius of Burlington, North Carolina. My query was Chantal with the time filter set for the past week. My results were presented in both in a map of results and a list beneath it.
You see how the listing underneath has a green button reading “Search Site”? You’ll get the same thing if you click on a map pointer:
Click on that button and a Google search result for that site using your search settings will open in a new tab. The city of Mebane, as you can see, was all over the Chantal response.
If I were more interested in historical research, I could set my search settings to filter for multiple years. I didn’t see City of Burlington posting about Chantal, but I did find multiple pages about emergency preparedness.
CivicRadius Search is the final tool in a new site I’ve created called LocalSearchAmerica.com . LocalSearchAmerica is a set of three tools designed to find information online via city/state or state/DMA search. The other two are:
Local News TV — Browse 660 American TV stations by DMA/state and explore their latest content via YouTube RSS feeds.
Local Search America — Enter a US city and state to discover government agencies, TV stations, and universities in that metro area (DMA). Select up to 25 sites to bundle into a Google search.
I make these search tools because I think the current state of web search is boring and nonfunctional and I want to make it better.
I give them to you because I think you deserve comprehensive, well designed paths to useful online information in the same way that you deserve clean food and water. My resources are limited but I will do my best.
