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? […]
Turning Raleigh Trees into Hyperlocal News Reporters
I’m having so much fun playing with Raleigh’s tree dataset and giving the trees something to say. Today I gave the trees some hyperlocal news mojo. How it works: when you ask a tree for local news, the program checks to find streets nearby. It then uses a news API to check WRAL, WTVD, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mastodon Stadium Seats
Yesterday was a very big news day and I was curious to see how well Mastodon would keep me informed about breaking news as Twitter continues to crumble. I was disappointed. I run my own tiny instance populated by only about a dozen active users, so only a trickle of news was getting to my […]
Turning A Wikipedia Popularity List Into a News Search
Curly and I have been playing a game called “How much information can you get with no information?” A fun field to play this on is Wikipedia’s top 1000 pages list, which provides a list of Wikipedia’s articles by pageviews on a specific date. The information I’m trying to get from such a list is […]