News/Web Search Gizmos
News Search Tools
Back That Ask Up – Instantly remove recent days/months/years from your Google News search.
Marion’s Monocle v2 – Use information from the FCC license database to find American television stations by state, group them by city, and explore their Web space with either Google or Google News searches.
Non-Sketchy News Search v1 – Find media outlets by specifying similar ones, then make the resources you found part of a Google search.
Non-Sketchy News Search v2 – Do a keyword search for media sources on Wikipedia and make them part of a Google query.
StreetScoop Local News Search – Enter a street address and search for that street name in the Web space of local TV stations (thanks to an FCC lookup)
SchoolScoop Local News Search – Browse for American schools by city/state, then search for them on Google News with or without topical modifiers.
NewsDrizzle – Create word clouds from topical headlines and semi-randomly explore recent Google News.
Gossip Machine – Using pageview data, identify dates of particular popularity for Wikipedia pages and turn those dates into Google and Google News searches.
Gossip Machine v2 – An updated version of Gossip Machine that uses z-scores and visual indicators.
Double Stuff Gossip Machine – Using pageviews data, find the intersection in popularity between two Wikipedia pages and search for those dates on Google and Google News.
Google News Timeline Template – Create several date-based Google News searches for a single query.
Politician Parade – Adds a state’s Congressional representatives to a Google News search.
Web Search Tools
CloudSERP Explorer – View Bing, Bing News, and WordPress search results as word clouds and use them to refine your searches further.
No Shop Sherlock – Remove different types of results from your Google search, including ecommerce, social media, books, and video.
Shuffle Search – Arrange a Google query of up to four words into all possible combinations and renders them into clickable Google searches.
Smushy Search – Takes a topical search term and uses the Datamuse API to find random related words and add them to your query in order to randomize the results of Google topic searches.
Sinker Search – Use Google’s 32-word query limit to enhance the importance of and “weight” a specific element in your search query.
Super Edu Search – Use information from Data.gov’s College Scorecard to do very specific searching on .edu domains with Google’s site: syntax.
Time-Sliced News Search – Specify a year and generate date-restricted searches for several news search engines, including Google News and Google Books.
Blogspace Time Machine – Enter a query and find out what bloggers were saying about that topic 1, 3, 5, 10, or 15 years ago.
Blog Shovel – Use URL patterns to reach deep into old Web archives and blogs with a Google search.
Congressional Social Media Explorer – Use the ProPublica Congress API to find information about the social media space of Congress members past and present, then translate that information into Google searches.
Senator Social Slices – Explore the Twitter-space of the members of the current US Senate cohort. Search by birth decade/generation, zodiac sign, gender, political party, and other parameters.