Thinking About Search. A lot.
March 21, 2024
Experiment time! Go do a Web search for ‘hairstyles “totally tubular”.’ Then do another search ‘hairstyles groovy.’ Of course the search results are VERY different in their content, but they do have something in common: they’re oriented to a particular era. The first search will get you lots of mentions of the 1980s in the […]
Being uneducated (I rock a GED) makes me constantly aware that my knowledge is extremely limited. This has shaped much of my search thinking. When I approach a certain kind of search problem I assume there is some kind of higher education classification system I’m completely unfamiliar with and some kind of professional vocabulary I […]
I do believe there might be a place for AI in search, but I don’t think it’s as part of a a black box. If I’m going to use AI as part of my search experience I want to see what it’s doing right in front of me. I’ve been messing around a bit making […]
December 18, 2023
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 […]
A couple of days ago I took the #Raleigh #OpenData dataset of trees and connected it to the #Wikipedia geolocation API and from there to a ChatGPT API prompt so the tree could talk about the things around it. Find tree, find things near tree, have tree describe itself and the things nearby. The results […]
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 […]
WordPress is great when you need to maintain an blog or some other kind of archive, but if you don’t need that functionality it can be annoying. None of the tools on SearchGizmos.com , for example, work on your phone due to some kind of conflict between my JavaScript and WordPress’ JavaScript. So I’ve been […]
July 25, 2023
It used to be that if I found some online writing I really liked, I’d look up and follow the author on Twitter. Now I look up the author and follow them on LinkedIn. This opinion piece by Elizabeth Lopatto is first rate. I love it when an entire article resonates from the jump. ‘Get […]
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching. In Part II, I looked at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces and do […]