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 […]
Finding the “Main Characters” in Wikipedia Categories
If I gave you a list of twenty people from Wikipedia and told you to list them in order of cultural prominence without consulting an external reference, how would you do it? You’d probably start by identifying people you know. You’d use your knowledge to sort them as best you could. But what about the […]
Shaking Wikipedia Categories to See What Pops Up
I’ve been spending the last few days playing with my favorite mental chew toy, the question “How do you ask for what you don’t know?” It’s an important question because every search engine query above a certain level of complexity involves filling in a knowledge gap. How you understand, define, and contextualize that gap means […]
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 […]
I Talk to the Treeeeessss… with a ChatGPT API Call
I’ve learned enough since last October that I can revisit my project of having Raleigh’s trees act as tour guides for surrounding areas. The city of Raleigh offers an open dataset of city trees. Not every last tree in the city, of course, mostly trees on city property. My old program searched the tree database, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Gossip Machine As An Information Trap
Hot diggity! I made my first Web monitoring tool! If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ve heard me talk about Gossip Machine. At its core, Gossip Machine analyzes a Wikipedia article’s page views over a given time period and identifies days with unusually high page views. The idea is that audience attention […]
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 […]