Do your Internet research tasks include a lot of date-based searching? I find that date-based searching helps a lot when searching historical (and man do I feel weird saying that about stuff that happened just a couple decades ago) events, companies, people and information. The results you’ll find when searching for something in its contemporary […]
Slicing and Dicing YouTube Searches Into Google Queries
I was doodlebugging around and made a YouTube-based Google query builder. It slices a topical query five different ways and builds a list of keywords for each set of results. (Unique ones are a different color and marked with a star.) Click on the keywords to add them to your Google query, the results of […]
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 Blogging: MiniGladys Has Replaced 90% Of My Google “Quick Reference” Searches – No AI Required.
I have been writing about and using Google for decades, so I get it — it’s super-easy to use Google for quick one-off searches like finding official web sites, getting a name spelled correctly, getting a quick topic overview, etc. But with Google’s insistence on using water and electricity on AI to summarize the information […]
Attention Junction Now Suggests Related Topics and I Love the Way It Helps Me Search
Attention Junction, a tool I recently created that explores overlapping public interest in topics using Wikipedia page views, has a new feature: it now suggests related topics so you can create topic pairs while not knowing anything beyond the initial topic in which you’re interested. Does this new feature use AI? Nope, it’s using the […]
CivicRadius Search: Find Gov Web Sites On a Map And Search Them Via Google
CivicRadius Search is a different way to find and search American government web sites. Instead of searching with keywords, search using city/state and radius and get results on a map.
Local Search America: Search the Web by DMA
Today I finished creating Local Search America, a new way to create specific search spaces for authoritative institutions in American DMAs. Enter a city/state. LSA identifies television stations and government agencies which serve that area as well as institutions of higher education in that area. Up to 25 of those sites can be bundled into a Google search (using Google’s site: operator.)
Building Spaces for Local Search Using DMA
As Google’s web search continues to be boring and filled with AI weirdness (I would have no problem if it were boring *and worked*), I continue on my mission to demonstrate that there are a lot more ways we could be building search spaces. I spent the last few days building datasets for it, then […]
Grouping Concepts Temporally Instead of Topically, Using Wikipedia Data
There’s been so much talk about “vibes” in programming lately that it gave me an idea for a Wikipedia tool. If you accept the idea that Wikipedia page view data can be used as “fossilized attention” (indicators of public interest in a topic) then you can use information extracted from page view data — like […]
Video: How to Use US Local News Search
If you’ve got two minutes and seventeen seconds to spare, I can teach you how to use the US Local News Search. Enter in a city and state and discover the TV stations which serve that city as well as the newspapers and NPR stations which serve the state. Select up to 25 sources from […]