The silver lining to the cloud of increasing search awfulness is that it’s forced me to think deeply about what search queries are. This has lead me to consider the idea of topical knowledge as an atomistic concept, an ever-shifting cloud of ideas attached to a central notion. The central notion can be as general […]
Searching in Data Tide Pools Before Braving Google’s Oceans
I’ve been playing with the idea of building a little wading pool of data that offers a limited but reasonably authoritative collection of information (in this case Wikipedia), and then exploring the relationships between those data to build more complex search engine queries that are less likely to get snared by junk Google results. I made […]
Using ChatGPT to Double-Distill Mojeek Results into a Date-Based Topic Overview
My concern about AI-assisted search results has been, from the beginning, the lack of human context. A simple query is rarely going to be sufficient in itself; after all, the user is searching because of some existing information lack. Outside of the most basic queries (When is a movie playing? Where is that restaurant? How […]
Evaluating ChatGPT’s Knowledge Based On Year of Source Data
I’ve been talking to myself in JavaScript about Google’s terrible AI results and why it’s so difficult to have AI turn scraped web into useful search results. I made a thing that does a Mojeek search and restricts results to a specific year via url pattern matching/result filtering. It then retrieves and bundles the filtered […]
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 […]
Adding a Date Mode to My Google Alerts Replacement
If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you may remember me talking about the idea of persistent metadata. By “persistent metadata,” I mean that every thing in a physical universe can be identified by WHERE they are and WHEN they are. A person is born here, educated here, works here, moved here, died […]