Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites. We’ll start with Local News TV.
A Use Case for TimeCake
People ask me sometimes for “use cases” for the things I make. It’s not something I think about too much — I need something, I create it — but this morning I found something that I think fits well so I wanted to share. Google announced yesterday a new local search app for Windows. When […]
Blaugust: Four Tools for Easier Date-Based Searching
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 […]
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.
Wikipedia Seismograph: Using Date-Based News Search to Avoid Puff Pieces
I’ve been following the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni situation. Lately it’s strayed into PR / crisis management. One of the commentary channels I listen to mentioned today that celebrities might put out tons of stories and puff pieces to “push down” less-flattering results in Google searches. But that won’t work with Wikipedia Seismograph! WS […]
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 […]
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!
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 […]
Creating Four-Dimensional Search Queries
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 […]