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 […]
SearchTweaks.com Updated – 16 Free Tools for Better Web Search
I learned so much overhauling WikiTwister that I immediately came up with several ideas for improving SearchTweaks, my collection of 16 web-based tools for making your web search better/easier/more interesting. After a very busy few days I have uploaded the new version and I’m delighted to share it with you. SearchTweaks is free to use […]
A 3-Minute Video on How to Use Wikipedia Seismograph
EDIT: Someone asked me if this video is on YouTube. It is, right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8XxxvQ6alY . I wanted to make sure I provided it in a format that didn’t automatically come with advertising, which is why I didn’t share that link first. I have a phobia about doing videos because I have a goofy voice […]
Expanding Wikipedia Seismograph Into a Related Concept Explorer
Before, Wikipedia Seismograph used Wikipedia page view spikes to create date-bounded Google News searches, but I added in a bunch of different APIs and functionality. Now it’s a concept-exploring machine and I’ve barely gotten started adding stuff to it.
Exploring YouTube Channels Via Wikidata
My obsession with YouTube search has entered its second week. This time I’m playing with a way to browse YouTube channels while using Wikidata as context.
Wikipedia and YouTube: A Beautiful Search Mashup
After trying to trace an AI slopline from popular Wikipedia topics to YouTube, I decided to see if I could make a more general YouTube search that builds queries off Wikipedia pages. It works great!
Tracing a Slopline from Wikipedia to YouTube
I wanted to see if there was a connection between popular Wikipedia topics and produced slop so I knocked a tool together and called it Slopline; it checks Wikipedia by date for trending pages and checks YouTube by same date to see if the topics have been slopified into short, AI-heavy video.
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, […]
Updating WikiTwister
Last year I put together WikiTwister, a site for Wikipedia / Wikidata tools. It was useful but I never really liked the design. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve updated it and added a couple of new tools. I think you’ll like it! Here are the six tools that make up the new WikiTwister. […]
Find Out What’s Moving and Shaking With Wikipedia Hot Topics
Wikipedia Hot Topics analyzes the top 1000 Wikipedia pages for a given date, finds the ones which had a significant view bump against a 7-day median (more than 100%), then divides them into categories (living humans, deceased humans, films, even categories like “rare diseases”. The category information is being taken from Wikidata’s P31 “instance of” value.) Each Wikipedia article on the list gets a detail section with more information about the article along with link to external tools and resources.