Yesterday I finished the housework, got ResearchBuzz squared away, and sat down at the computer about 2pm with the intention of doing some troubleshooting of Local Search America‘s news aggregator, Local News America.

SEVEN AND A HALF HOURS LATER I creakily unfolded myself and staggered to the kitchen in search of linner. What I thought was going to be a quick change ended up being a very long but ultimately fruitful bug hunt and upgrade.

Local News America aggregates the RSS feeds of over 1000 local news sources and makes them searchable by keyword and/or browsable by state with links back to the original content. About a dozen topic feeds (including data centers, activism, and local / federal government) are also available. (The site doesn’t scrape the web for full article content. It aggregates public RSS feeds only.)

The search is much faster now. There was a bug that was hiding sources from some states; that has been resolved.

I admit that 90% of the reason I made Local News America was so I could look at data center news by state. Google News didn’t seem to have an easy way to do that and I wanted one. When you can specify the topic of data center and then the location of the news you’re browsing, you’re managing a pretty good information focus without getting specific at all. When you add keyword searching *on top* of that focus, then you’re really narrowing down your search.

As more and more slop, propaganda, and disinformation infests the open Web, my thoughts turn increasingly to building search spaces from known sources. Of course I don’t want to just build search spaces, I want to build ways to explore and query them as usefully as possible.

I have some ideas in my head of how different groups of search spaces could feed and support each other, but I don’t have the language to articulate it yet. I can kind of feel it in my head as a pattern, but I need to go down this path a bit further.

Local News America, like Local Search America, is free to use and free of ads.