I’m still working to add new sources to the United States Local News Search ( https://searchtweaks.com/lns/ ). It started with just TV stations and then I added newspapers. I’ve now added a third source: NPR member stations. In addition, I’ve done some cleaning and polishing and the program’s easier to use. US Local News Search […]
US Local News Search Gets State Newspapers
I’ve been continuing work on my US Local News search because I’m sick of trying to find news online and getting whatever slop someone managed to slip into a search engine’s index. When I want local news I want LOCAL NEWS, not junk! I’ve just finished a new version and I’m pleased to share it […]
Wikipedia Articles As Containers Holding Intra-Wiki Link Elements: Turning Those Into Search Queries
My thinking about Web search and making the most useful query possible has focused a lot recently on the idea of query-as-cloud-of-topics; instead of thinking about George Washington as a singular search terms you might think of him as a structure encompassing every possible way you can contextually describe George Washington – dentures, cherry trees, […]
Honest-to-goodness LOCAL NEWS search, thanks to the FCC database
Searching Google for news stories is like spinning a roulette wheel nowadays: there’s no telling what you’re going to land on. Are you going to get a thoughtfully-crafted article from a local outlet, or are you going to get some flotsam from a scrape-and-spit infosewage generator or some spun-up propaganda from an information warfare site? […]
MastoGizmos Gets An Overhaul
I had a very productive Labor Day weekend. I finally got WikiTwister figured out, and last night I finished upgrading MastoGizmos ( https://mastogizmos.com/ )! MastoGizmos is a collection of 11 search tools to explore Mastodon. (You do not have to have a Mastodon account to use any of these tools.) There are tools for hashtag […]
Updating WikiTwister
Last year I put together WikiTwister, a site for Wikipedia / Wikidata tools. It was useful but I never really liked the design. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve updated it and added a couple of new tools. I think you’ll like it! Here are the six tools that make up the new WikiTwister. […]
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.
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 […]