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 […]
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 […]
Perovskite Plain or Solar?
Experiment time! Go do a Web search for ‘hairstyles “totally tubular”.’ Then do another search ‘hairstyles groovy.’ Of course the search results are VERY different in their content, but they do have something in common: they’re oriented to a particular era. The first search will get you lots of mentions of the 1980s in the […]
Putting AI on a Leash for Search Experiments
I do believe there might be a place for AI in search, but I don’t think it’s as part of a a black box. If I’m going to use AI as part of my search experience I want to see what it’s doing right in front of me. I’ve been messing around a bit making […]
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 […]
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 […]
Light Dawns On Marblehead: You Can Use Mastodon’s Verified Identities as Search Filters
I was really pleased with the way my Mastodon tool “Gift Article Gazette” turned out. It made me eager to do more hashtag-based Mastodon search tools, but I was worried about spam. After poking into the Mastodon API, though, I think I’ve found big possibilities. I didn’t realize exactly how much information the Mastodon API delivers. […]
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part III: Popularity/Interest)
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching. In Part II, I looked at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces and do […]
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part II: Authority)
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching. In Part II, I want to look at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces […]