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 […]
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? […]
Turning Raleigh Trees into Hyperlocal News Reporters
I’m having so much fun playing with Raleigh’s tree dataset and giving the trees something to say. Today I gave the trees some hyperlocal news mojo. How it works: when you ask a tree for local news, the program checks to find streets nearby. It then uses a news API to check WRAL, WTVD, and […]
AI Is Better With Human Attention As Search Context
Human attention as context for Internet search is immensely powerful. Having an understanding of WHEN a topic was of particular interest allows you to create date-bounded searches that provide more information-rich results and less junk. Which is why it drives me absolutely bonkers that we have a gold mine of human attention records in the […]
SearchTweaks.com – 16 Tools to Make Your Google Search Better
Happy holidays! I made you a present: a collection of sixteen tools to make your Google search better, presented in a new site called SearchTweaks.com . As you might imagine, after over 25 years of writing about search engines I have plenty of thoughts and opinions about what’s missing in the search experience and what could be […]
Hooking the ProPublica Congress API and the FCC Licensing API together and pointing them at Google
This recent political stuff has impressed upon me that I should be doing more to connect politician data to local news data. Furthermore, as long as I’m doing that I should be making news monitoring tools. So that’s what I’ve been doodling around with today. Here’s how it works – currently I’m working on just […]
Mastodon Stadium Seats
Yesterday was a very big news day and I was curious to see how well Mastodon would keep me informed about breaking news as Twitter continues to crumble. I was disappointed. I run my own tiny instance populated by only about a dozen active users, so only a trickle of news was getting to my […]
Turning A Wikipedia Popularity List Into a News Search
Curly and I have been playing a game called “How much information can you get with no information?” A fun field to play this on is Wikipedia’s top 1000 pages list, which provides a list of Wikipedia’s articles by pageviews on a specific date. The information I’m trying to get from such a list is […]