Let me tell you about a search tool of mine I just upgraded using Diffbot’s new Web API. It’s an upgraded version of Super Edu Search that I’m calling Super Edu Search Powered by Diffbot.

I bet you have added site:edu to a Google search at some point. It’s an easy way to instantly elevate your results, especially for certain queries. But it can only take you so far, as it searches a single monolith — the edu TLD — and doesn’t allow you to narrow down that universe.

There seemed to be some missed opportunities there so a few years ago I made Super Edu Search. SES uses the Department of Education’s dataset of higher education institutions to let you do edu searches I can only describe as precise. Want to search all HBCUs in North Carolina for “Dr. William Barber”? You can do that. Want to search all publicly-owned schools in Florida for “hurricane preparation”? You can do that. Want to search medical schools for “raw milk”? You can do that.

Super Edu Search 1.0 aggregated sets of domains and presented them as Google search URLs because I can’t afford Google’s search API and that was a free workaround. But Diffbot’s API is free and so I can integrate its search results into the tool. Results are organized by institution, with badges providing information on everything from enrollment to Congressional district.

Since this result integration seemed like it would be useful to researchers, I added the ability to download search results as CSV or PDF. Each download includes metadata about the search itself before results.

Just like the older one, this version of Super Edu Search is free to use and free of ads.