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. đ
Five Ways Google Could Improve Search In 2025 That Have Nothing To Do With AI
You might have read that Google is planning to go hard on AI in 2025. I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed. Google doubling down on AI tech while its search results get less and less useful is frustrating. More frustrating is the fact that there are ALL KINDS of things Google could do to […]
SearchTweaks.com Updated
I’m getting everything ready for my APRA Wisconsin presentation on Wednesday, where I’ll be discussing how to use three of my web sites — SearchTweaks.com, WikiTwister.com, and MegaGladys.com . To that end I spent this morning updating SearchTweaks, changing some things around and killing some bugs. Unfortunately the local news search is going to stay […]
US Local News Search, Now With TV Stations, Newspapers, *and* NPR Member Stations
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 […]
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? […]
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. […]
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 […]
Keep An Eye on the Fediverse With the Mastodon Hashtag Monitor
Over 15 years ago I wrote a book called Information Trapping. It was about how to set up online monitors to find online information around certain keywords and keep it coming as a flow to you via tools like RSS, page monitors, etc. As you might imagine, Information Trapping’s resources and tool listings are very […]
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 […]