I’ve invented a game called “Find The Most Unhinged Google Alert”. This is a challenge to discover the phrase that will get you the craziest news stories from your monitoring service of choice. The rules are simple: no proper names, no topics, nothing particularly targeted. A generic phrase descriptive of the most possible chaos, as […]
Local News America Gets Faster Search and Smushed Bugs
Local News America aggregates the RSS feeds of over 1000 local news sources and makes them searchable by keyword and/or browsable by state with links back to the original content. I’ve smushed some bugs and made the search faster.
Adding Two New Tools to SearchTweaks.com
I don’t know about y’all but I am having my usual wild Friday night working on my search tools. I’ve just added two new tools to SearchTweaks.com; if you do any local news searching I think you’ll really like at least one of them. Like all of the site they are free to use and free of ads.
Search by Year (1995+) and State News Sources: Peabody Search
It seems like every day you read about some new fake web site or site network spewing disinformation or AI slop into Google results. One of my strategies for getting around this search crud is restricting my search to authoritative sources, like FCC-licensed outlets, or known resources, like NPR stations. But Google makes this difficult. […]
Super Edu Search, Powered By Diffbot
Let me tell you about a search tool of mine I just upgraded using Diffbot’s new Web API. It’s an upgraded version of Super Edu Search that I’m calling Super Edu Search Powered by Diffbot. I bet you have added site:edu to a Google search at some point. It’s an easy way to instantly elevate […]
New dataset of GLAM (Galleries / Libraries / Archives / Museums) RSS feeds available on GitHub
RSS feeds aren’t dead! And to prove it I’ve started working on a new dataset of GLAM (Galleries / Libraries / Archives / Museums)-related RSS feeds. I’ve uploaded the initial version — 399 GLAM-related feeds, all human-verified, most updated this year (a couple dozen updated in 2025, nothing earlier than that) — to GitHub ( […]
Fixing A Few Issues With RSSGizmos.com
I’m doing some more site housekeeping! If you’re into RSS, especially creating keyword- or location-based feeds, check out my site RSS Gizmos. I fixed some problems with my URL fetches and now the site is going great. RSS Gizmos is a collection of ten tools for finding, examining, and creating RSS feeds. If you’ve been […]
Upgrading BlogHiking.com: More Results, Site Muting
WordPress blog explorer Blog Hiking has been upgraded with more results and a couple of new features.
Three Search Alternatives to Google’s Brave New AI World
Google has made what I consider to be the terrible decision to go all-in on AI in search and there’s little I can do personally against that decision. Still, I can make alternatives. I can express my ideas in tools that I share with you. I can at least try to hold space for the idea that there are ways to perform queries and create search spaces that Silicon Valley does not offer, and maybe those ways are worth your time (they’re certainly worth mine.) Here are three search tools you might want to try in place of Google’s turn to AI. They are all free and ad-free.
Digging Out From The Deluge of AI News And Turning It Into Another Newsletter
For the last few months assembling ResearchBuzz has been increasingly frustrating. AI news was crowding out most of the other categories and I felt like the newsletter itself was getting much too AI-heavy. Things finally came to a head when I found myself with a 6200-item RSS backlog and 50 articles in my newsletter queue, […]