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 […]
Perovskite Plain or Solar?
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
What Do Internet Users Know About Social Signals and How Can We Apply that to Mastodon search?
It used to be that if I found some online writing I really liked, I’d look up and follow the author on Twitter. Now I look up the author and follow them on LinkedIn. This opinion piece by Elizabeth Lopatto is first rate. I love it when an entire article resonates from the jump. ‘Get […]
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part III: Popularity/Interest)
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching. In Part II, I looked at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces and do […]
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part II: Authority)
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching. In Part II, I want to look at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces […]