If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you may remember me talking about the idea of persistent metadata. By “persistent metadata,” I mean that every thing in a physical universe can be identified by WHERE they are and WHEN they are. A person is born here, educated here, works here, moved here, died […]
Remaking Google Uncle Sam (Sort Of) With Mojeek and a CISA Dataset
Do you remember Google Uncle Sam? I can’t blame you if you don’t; Google killed it off in 2011. It was a specialty search offering of Google’s that restricted its results to .gov sites. Very useful! There was a lot of grumbling after it was shut down; in fact, I made a replacement in 2012 […]
“Barbie’s Dream Google Alerts”
I’ve spent today, around my visit to Granny, making “Barbie’s Dream Alerts” with Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet. 😂 (No, I’m not going to call them that. I’m going to call them Calishat Snaps.) There’s some functionality I’ve always missed in Google Alerts that I decided I wanted in my version, so my […]
Concept Lensing
Being uneducated (I rock a GED) makes me constantly aware that my knowledge is extremely limited. This has shaped much of my search thinking. When I approach a certain kind of search problem I assume there is some kind of higher education classification system I’m completely unfamiliar with and some kind of professional vocabulary I […]
Rewiring Super Edu Search for Stract
Someone on Mastodon gave me a great idea for a search tool, but I’m having to think my way around some CORS issues so it’s stewing in the back of my brain. In the meantime I’m working on integrating the Stract search API with Super Edu Search. I made Super Edu Search because Google’s site: […]
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 […]
Making a MegaGladys
WordPress is great when you need to maintain an blog or some other kind of archive, but if you don’t need that functionality it can be annoying. None of the tools on SearchGizmos.com , for example, work on your phone due to some kind of conflict between my JavaScript and WordPress’ JavaScript. So I’ve been […]