I’ve been writing and thinking about search engines and Web search since 1996.
The writing has not been incessant but the thinking has. For a long time I’ve privately pondered questions like:
- How do you search when you’re just starting? How do you ask for what you don’t know?
- How can one use commonly-understood metadata to inform and direct a user’s search in a transparent way?
- How can we put the same amount of care in developing a data pool to explore as we do into developing a search query?
- What are ways we can ethically take real-world data like location and blend it into a Web or social media search?
In the last four or five years I’ve tried to explore some of these questions using Google Sheets as a platform. But that platform is hard to share and expand.
In the spring of 2022 I looked around and realized that if I really wanted to make search things I needed to learn JavaScript. So I signed up to SkillShare and took a Kalob Taulien course (that is NOT an affiliate link.) I got through 50 of the 59 lessons before getting distracted by all the things I wanted to make. And since then I’ve been making Search Gizmos. In October 2022 I started this site to share them with you.
Some Gizmos here require that you get an API key, but the keys are always free. I try to keep the requirements on your side as simple as possible – few keys, using the most Open APIs I can. These are limiting requirements, but I have over 25 years’ worth of thought experiments to build and I think I’ve made at least a few slightly interesting things.
Look below for ten random Gizmos to try. Look over on the left for a list of popular Gizmos, a search box, and a tag cloud. An RSS feed link is at the very bottom if you’d care to follow along. Thanks for visiting.
01-06-2023: New Gizmo — MastoWindow — Explore hashtags across Mastodon instances
01-06-2023: New Gizmo — CountryFeed RSS Generator for Bing News
12-28-2022: New Gizmo — Mastodon Web Space Search
12-27-2022: I updated No Shop Sherlock so it has four filters for your Web search – general search cruft, online bookstores, social media sites, and video sites.
Reduce Google’s Ecommerce Results With No Shop Sherlock
Quickly Chart Page Views With the Wikipedia Page Count Checker
Satisfy Your Temporary Curiosity with RSS Feed Maker JOOC Box
Add Some Ooky-Spooky With Wikiween, The Wikipedia Cemetery Generator
Make Some Charts With the Wikipedia Gender Scanner
Create Lifespan Web Searches with the Contemporary Biography Builder
Dig into Google Using Wikipedia Topics with Clumpy Bounce Topic Search
Explore Wikipedia Pages By Popularity With Category Cheat Sheet
Dig Into the Blog- and News- Space of Yesteryear With Blog Shovel
Generate and Search For Name Variants With Carl’s Name Net