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 […]
Concept Lensing
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 […]
Putting AI on a Leash for Search Experiments
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 […]
Rewiring Super Edu Search for Stract
Someone on Mastodon gave me a great idea for a search tool, but I’m having to think my way around some CORS issues so it’s stewing in the back of my brain. In the meantime I’m working on integrating the Stract search API with Super Edu Search. I made Super Edu Search because Google’s site: […]
Tinkering With WikiTwister
I’m using the holiday to work on WikiTwister, which is a utility site with tools designed to extract information from Wikipedia. This will be my SIXTH (!) hand-coded Web site this year (what the heck, Calishain.) Every time I make a site I try to make it one step better than the one before. With […]
SearchTweaks.com – 16 Tools to Make Your Google Search Better
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 […]
Making the Trees Talk
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 […]
Hooking the ProPublica Congress API and the FCC Licensing API together and pointing them at Google
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 […]
Making a MegaGladys
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 […]
9/11
What do you THINK I was doing on 9/11? I was aggregating and updating a resource list just as fast as I could. My stepson lived in New York City at the time and while he was fine we didn’t hear from him until late in the day (the phones were down) so it helped […]