In 2025 I made 13 new tools for better search and content curation, using Google, Wikipedia, RSS, WordPress, and more. They’re all free and ad-free.
Browsing and Searching Members of Congress: Congress Corral
Congress Corral lets you browse members of Congress via a number of filters and provides a page of details of useful links for each one, but lots of political directories do that. The magic happens with the four other tabs on the detail page.
#politics #LocalNews #Wikipedia
Putting Up a Rough Draft of Congress Corral
For the last week or so I’ve been working on a way to keep up with all the Members of Congress I see on TV as the government remains closed. I wanted to have a way to see all the Members in one place and catch up on them quickly. What I’ve got so far I’m calling Congress Corral.
No Kings TV Returns With Updates
No Kings TV is an easy way to browse news about the No Kings protests this weekend across 120 sources in 21 US Metro areas. Now with Mastodon hashtags!
Exploring “War-Torn” Portland With Local Search America
Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites. We’ll start with Local News TV.
Attention Junction Now Suggests Related Topics and I Love the Way It Helps Me Search
Attention Junction, a tool I recently created that explores overlapping public interest in topics using Wikipedia page views, has a new feature: it now suggests related topics so you can create topic pairs while not knowing anything beyond the initial topic in which you’re interested. Does this new feature use AI? Nope, it’s using the […]
Evaluating Sustained Public Interest Via Wikipedia Page Views
I made a tool which identifies streaks of public interest (as expressed by Wikipedia page views) in two public figures, finds overlaps, and turns those overlaps into date-bounded Google / G News searches. I’ve been using it to try to understand the longevity of news events. Currently Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein have an 11-day […]
No Kings TV
EDIT: No Kings TV is up at https://searchtweaks.com/nkt/ . I’ve done the initial sweep of the top 20 markets and after finding all the RSS I could I’ve got 73 resources listed. More will be added as I go through the resources listed in US Local News Search, but I need to let my brain […]
Wikipedia Seismograph: Using Date-Based News Search to Avoid Puff Pieces
I’ve been following the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni situation. Lately it’s strayed into PR / crisis management. One of the commentary channels I listen to mentioned today that celebrities might put out tons of stories and puff pieces to “push down” less-flattering results in Google searches. But that won’t work with Wikipedia Seismograph! WS […]
“Protest” as a Wikipedia Topic for Public Interest
After the protests this weekend, I wondered if there had been a surge in public interest in the general Wikipedia topic of “protest.” So I plugged it into Wikipedia Seismograph to find out. Oh yes, there absolutely was. This also gave me a chance to test Wikipedia Attention Surfer to see what other topics were […]