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 […]
Searching in Data Tide Pools Before Braving Google’s Oceans
I’ve been playing with the idea of building a little wading pool of data that offers a limited but reasonably authoritative collection of information (in this case Wikipedia), and then exploring the relationships between those data to build more complex search engine queries that are less likely to get snared by junk Google results. I made […]
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 […]
Evaluating ChatGPT’s Knowledge Based On Year of Source Data
I’ve been talking to myself in JavaScript about Google’s terrible AI results and why it’s so difficult to have AI turn scraped web into useful search results. I made a thing that does a Mojeek search and restricts results to a specific year via url pattern matching/result filtering. It then retrieves and bundles the filtered […]
AI Is Better With Human Attention As Search Context
Human attention as context for Internet search is immensely powerful. Having an understanding of WHEN a topic was of particular interest allows you to create date-bounded searches that provide more information-rich results and less junk. Which is why it drives me absolutely bonkers that we have a gold mine of human attention records in the […]
Remaking Google Uncle Sam (Sort Of) With Mojeek and a CISA Dataset
Do you remember Google Uncle Sam? I can’t blame you if you don’t; Google killed it off in 2011. It was a specialty search offering of Google’s that restricted its results to .gov sites. Very useful! There was a lot of grumbling after it was shut down; in fact, I made a replacement in 2012 […]
Mixing Mojeek and Wikipedia
I really am trying to not get distracted by the Mojeek API, but people keep saying how bad Web search is right now, and the more they say that the more I think of other options. I very much like the way Mojeek offers the ability to “focus” your search by limiting it to a […]
Mojeek Goofery
Over the weekend I got a Google Alert with an ostensibly “new” news story that was actually from 2010, so I’ve moved “find a substitute for Google Alerts” to the top of my to-do list. I already have a news API I like okay, but that won’t monitor new Web pages for me — for […]
Temporal Topic Explorer
I’ve been spending the afternoon working on my Temporal Topic Explorer, and wow, I think I’m going to be using this a *lot*. I believe in sharing my toys, so if you want to try it too it’s at https://searchtweaks.com/tte/ . TTE takes advantage of dates in URL patterns. Many blogs and news sites publish […]