I was staring in frustration at the search results when I thought, “I wish I had some way of marking which of these results are useful and which aren’t, and then have an AI analyze the different sets for language use and give me suggestions for how I can revise my search to get more useful stuff and less crap.” Then I thought, “Oh damn, that sounds like a good idea, I should make that.” So I did.
Blaugust: Four Tools for Easier Date-Based Searching
Do your Internet research tasks include a lot of date-based searching? I find that date-based searching helps a lot when searching historical (and man do I feel weird saying that about stuff that happened just a couple decades ago) events, companies, people and information. The results you’ll find when searching for something in its contemporary […]
Slicing and Dicing YouTube Searches Into Google Queries
I was doodlebugging around and made a YouTube-based Google query builder. It slices a topical query five different ways and builds a list of keywords for each set of results. (Unique ones are a different color and marked with a star.) Click on the keywords to add them to your Google query, the results of […]
Echo Chambers No, Everything Chambers Yes: Three Tools For Nook-and-Cranny Searching
Yesterday I wrote about making search spaces and got accused of making echo chambers. So today I’ll show you how to get into the EVERYTHING CHAMBER with 3 tools for randomish and nook-and-cranny searching.
Blaugust: What Am I Supposed To Talk About?
I have several posts in draft but they’ve stayed in draft because I can’t convince myself you give half a crap. I don’t expect or require you to, of course: you owe me nothing. At the same time I’d like to entertain or teach you rather than irritate you, so shouldn’t I consider you, my […]
Blaugust Blogging: MiniGladys Has Replaced 90% Of My Google “Quick Reference” Searches – No AI Required.
I have been writing about and using Google for decades, so I get it — it’s super-easy to use Google for quick one-off searches like finding official web sites, getting a name spelled correctly, getting a quick topic overview, etc. But with Google’s insistence on using water and electricity on AI to summarize the information […]
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 […]
Analyze Overlapping Public Interest Via Wikipedia With Attention Junction
Attention Junction, what’s your function? To analyze the views of two Wikipedia pages, identify spans of public interest, find overlaps, and turn them into Google / Google News searches. All while being free to use and free of ads. Let me show you how it works.
CivicRadius Search: Find Gov Web Sites On a Map And Search Them Via Google
CivicRadius Search is a different way to find and search American government web sites. Instead of searching with keywords, search using city/state and radius and get results on a map.
Local Search America: Search the Web by DMA
Today I finished creating Local Search America, a new way to create specific search spaces for authoritative institutions in American DMAs. Enter a city/state. LSA identifies television stations and government agencies which serve that area as well as institutions of higher education in that area. Up to 25 of those sites can be bundled into a Google search (using Google’s site: operator.)