I’ve been spending my weekend playing with how Google Books could guide Web search after someone asked me about #3 in Five Ways Google Could Improve Search In 2025 That Have Nothing To Do With AI. How could Google Books make search better? I had some ideas and I applied JavaScript to them. After a few days of doodling around I’m at that point where I’ve got something that works so well I keep falling down rabbit holes playing with it. 😂
A Reddit Search Which Offers Paths, Not a List
Recently, I’ve been following a lot of Internet culture news stories and discovered that Reddit has a lot of useful information and backstory that I’ve missed. I decided to create my own Reddit search tool, Reddit Paths. Since I had access to full search results *and* I didn’t have to pay for them, I further decided to do a little experimenting and stunting.
Goofing Around With YouTube’s API (and Throwing In a Little AI)
I discovered the YouTube API this week and I’ve been using it to take out all my frustrations at YouTube’s terrible search offerings. I don’t know mobile, maybe it’s great on mobile, but YouTube’s search is balls on desktop. First I made a new channel search. Then, a video search. THEN, because I wanted a […]
Collab-O-Matic: Using AI To Create YouTuber Teamups
I’ve been thinking lately about using AI to aggregate and respond to current/contextual information as it seems to me that’s a better use of it than something as general as Web search. With Web search the AI requires a lot of contextual understanding and common sense which it doesn’t have, so you end up with […]
Web Search Where AI Is The Condiment And Not the Main Course
One of the reasons I’m not a big fan of AI search is that it doesn’t seem granular enough to me. That is to say, there’s not a lot of back-and-forth, patron interview type stuff so the AI is left to do a substantial amount of heavy lifting in the form of inferring all the […]
Machine-Visioning Match Game With Anthropic’s API
Sometimes as I’m learning JavaScript I feel stuck, like I’m spinning my wheels and not learning much. When that happens I tend to pick something low-stakes and silly to do to gain new skills — like maybe applying Anthropic’s machine vision API to old Match Game episodes?
Using ChatGPT to Double-Distill Mojeek Results into a Date-Based Topic Overview
My concern about AI-assisted search results has been, from the beginning, the lack of human context. A simple query is rarely going to be sufficient in itself; after all, the user is searching because of some existing information lack. Outside of the most basic queries (When is a movie playing? Where is that restaurant? How […]
Evaluating ChatGPT’s Knowledge Based On Year of Source Data
I’ve been talking to myself in JavaScript about Google’s terrible AI results and why it’s so difficult to have AI turn scraped web into useful search results. I made a thing that does a Mojeek search and restricts results to a specific year via url pattern matching/result filtering. It then retrieves and bundles the filtered […]
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 […]