Recently, I’ve been following a lot of Internet culture news stories and discovered that Reddit has a lot of useful information and backstory that I’ve missed. I decided to create my own Reddit search tool, Reddit Paths. Since I had access to full search results *and* I didn’t have to pay for them, I further decided to do a little experimenting and stunting.
Web Search Where AI Is The Condiment And Not the Main Course
One of the reasons I’m not a big fan of AI search is that it doesn’t seem granular enough to me. That is to say, there’s not a lot of back-and-forth, patron interview type stuff so the AI is left to do a substantial amount of heavy lifting in the form of inferring all the […]
SearchTweaks.com Updated
I’m getting everything ready for my APRA Wisconsin presentation on Wednesday, where I’ll be discussing how to use three of my web sites — SearchTweaks.com, WikiTwister.com, and MegaGladys.com . To that end I spent this morning updating SearchTweaks, changing some things around and killing some bugs. Unfortunately the local news search is going to stay […]
US Local News Search, Now With TV Stations, Newspapers, *and* NPR Member Stations
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 […]
Wikipedia Articles As Containers Holding Intra-Wiki Link Elements: Turning Those Into Search Queries
My thinking about Web search and making the most useful query possible has focused a lot recently on the idea of query-as-cloud-of-topics; instead of thinking about George Washington as a singular search terms you might think of him as a structure encompassing every possible way you can contextually describe George Washington – dentures, cherry trees, […]
I Talk to the Treeeeessss… with a ChatGPT API Call
I’ve learned enough since last October that I can revisit my project of having Raleigh’s trees act as tour guides for surrounding areas. The city of Raleigh offers an open dataset of city trees. Not every last tree in the city, of course, mostly trees on city property. My old program searched the tree database, […]
Remaking Google Uncle Sam (Sort Of) With Mojeek and a CISA Dataset
Do you remember Google Uncle Sam? I can’t blame you if you don’t; Google killed it off in 2011. It was a specialty search offering of Google’s that restricted its results to .gov sites. Very useful! There was a lot of grumbling after it was shut down; in fact, I made a replacement in 2012 […]
Mixing Mojeek and Wikipedia
I really am trying to not get distracted by the Mojeek API, but people keep saying how bad Web search is right now, and the more they say that the more I think of other options. I very much like the way Mojeek offers the ability to “focus” your search by limiting it to a […]
“Barbie’s Dream Google Alerts”
I’ve spent today, around my visit to Granny, making “Barbie’s Dream Alerts” with Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet. 😂 (No, I’m not going to call them that. I’m going to call them Calishat Snaps.) There’s some functionality I’ve always missed in Google Alerts that I decided I wanted in my version, so my […]