I wanted to search WordPress and find blogs that were more heavily covering the content I was interested in. I wanted to find a way to generate possibly-related keywords so I could build additional searches off the first one. The search offered at WordPress.com did not have all the features I was looking for, so I made my own and wrapped in a hiking metaphor. #WordPress #blogs #OSINT
Browsing and Searching Members of Congress: Congress Corral
Congress Corral lets you browse members of Congress via a number of filters and provides a page of details of useful links for each one, but lots of political directories do that. The magic happens with the four other tabs on the detail page.
#politics #LocalNews #Wikipedia
Putting Up a Rough Draft of Congress Corral
For the last week or so I’ve been working on a way to keep up with all the Members of Congress I see on TV as the government remains closed. I wanted to have a way to see all the Members in one place and catch up on them quickly. What I’ve got so far I’m calling Congress Corral.
Wiki-Guided Google Search II
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a Wikipedia article, break it down by headings, do a word-frequency analysis on each block of text, and then click and toggle the most frequent/unusual words into a search box to build Google queries for that topic Well guess what!
Exploring “War-Torn” Portland With Local Search America
Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites. We’ll start with Local News TV.
A Use Case for TimeCake
People ask me sometimes for “use cases” for the things I make. It’s not something I think about too much — I need something, I create it — but this morning I found something that I think fits well so I wanted to share. Google announced yesterday a new local search app for Windows. When […]
Researching Public Figures in the Epstein Birthday Book, Part I: MiniGladys
MiniGladys is a collection of four Wikipedia-based research tools. In the time it takes for a few clicks and a few reads you can get background on Leon Black, for example, find major news stories linked to him, and discover topics related to him that you might not know about. Here’s how.
QueryAnvil: AI As Search Sidekick Instead of Main Character
I was staring in frustration at the search results when I thought, “I wish I had some way of marking which of these results are useful and which aren’t, and then have an AI analyze the different sets for language use and give me suggestions for how I can revise my search to get more useful stuff and less crap.” Then I thought, “Oh damn, that sounds like a good idea, I should make that.” So I did.
Echo Chambers No, Everything Chambers Yes: Three Tools For Nook-and-Cranny Searching
Yesterday I wrote about making search spaces and got accused of making echo chambers. So today I’ll show you how to get into the EVERYTHING CHAMBER with 3 tools for randomish and nook-and-cranny searching.
Blaugust: Heard about Google’s “Preferred Sources”? Here are 4 Other Ways to Find Specific News Outlets
Have you heard about Google’s new “preferred sources?” I’ll show you three other ways to discover news sources and bundle them into a Google search and one way to find TV news by US metro area.