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 […]
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.
See How Wikipedia Topics Are Shaking the News With a Wikipedia Seismograph
By visually displaying the deviations from a seven-day moving average in a chart (which looks to me like a seismograph output) you can easily see peaks in the public’s interest in a topic. Of course, that knowledge isn’t very interesting unless you can also discover why the interest has peaked, so the WPS also includes a feature to let you create date-bounded Google News searches using the chart output.
Upgrading WikiCat Main Characters
Last week I wrote about a new tool I made called WikiCat Main Characters. With WMC, you can search for Wikipedia categories by keyword and then explore the people within those categories to find the “main characters” — the people whose Wikipedia articles have had the biggest bump in pageviews over the past month. The […]
Making Location-Based Timelines With Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Mojeek
I started learning JavaScript in Mayish 2022. I wanted to make tools to address some of the things I disliked about Google search, and after looking around it seemed like JavaScript was the best solution. So I signed up for a course, thrashed and flailed my way through 50 of the 59 lessons, and then […]
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 […]