#specialtysearch — Public Fediverse posts

Glenn M. brought Archive of Archives to my attention. (Thank you sir! Good to hear from you.) Based on the GitHub I would guess it launched around March. From the home page: “Archive of Archives is a curated collection of digital archives developed by SHAPE. All are welcome to contribute to the project. Archive submission guidelines can be found on GitHub.”

The Register: Give Google the boot by building your own search engine. “If you’re fed up with search results drowning out the bits of the web you actually care about, you could always build your own search index, as one developer did. Nottingham, UK-based software dev Alex Morley-Finch built the open-source project dubbed Marlin for himself, cataloging around 560,000 homepages for roughly $10 […]

The Verge: Disney Plus tries a new AI-powered search. “Disney is testing a new AI-powered tool for Disney Plus that uses a natural language search, a voice query, or a suggested prompt to create a customized row of show and movie recommendations.”

Calishat: Local News America Gets Faster Search and Smushed Bugs. “Local News America aggregates the RSS feeds of over 1000 local news sources and makes them searchable by keyword and/or browsable by state with links back to the original content. About a dozen topic feeds (including data centers, activism, and local / federal government) are also available. (The site doesn’t scrape the web […]

Kyiv Independent: Wildberries hides military goods in search results after Ukrainian strikes hammer warehouses. “Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries, has stopped displaying military-related goods in response to searches that refer directly to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to reports published on July 26. The development comes after seven of the company’s warehouses were […]

FYIVT: Vermont Just Got Its Own Search Engine — And It Reads the Documents Google Can’t. “The FYIVT Finder currently indexes more than 90,000 documents (and growing as you read this). That includes every Vermont bill dating back to 2010, searchable by subject rather than only by bill number. It includes more than 45,000 legislative committee documents — testimony, amendments, reports and […]

Calishat: Adding Two New Tools to SearchTweaks.com. “I don’t know about y’all but I am having my usual wild Friday night working on my search tools. I’ve just added two new tools to SearchTweaks.com; if you do any local news searching I think you’ll really like at least one of them. Like all of the site they are free to use and free of ads….SearchTweaks is a collection of 19 tools for […]

Search Engine Land: Ask YouTube AI search experience expands to U.S. desktop users. “Ask YouTube lets users type natural-language questions into the YouTube search bar and receive responses that combine text, video clips, long-form videos, and Shorts. Users can also ask follow-up questions to refine results.” I’ve tried it. It’s fine. YouTube’s regular search is so bad in my opinion that it’s […]

Engadget: Microsoft is making the Windows Search Box more streamlined and useful . “Microsoft announced that a bunch of new adjustments are coming to the Windows Search Box in Windows 11. Each individual item is a minor improvement, but hopefully in aggregate, the changes will add up to a better experience for search.”

Alec.is: IP Crawl: Exposing The Massive Open Webcam Crisis. “IP Crawl…actively crawls the web for exposed webcams—specifically targeting feeds that require absolutely no username, password, or specialized exploit to access. If it’s open to the public internet… then it’s on this radar.”

University of Washington: GovScape lets you easily search millions of government documents. “At the end of every presidential term, the End of Term Web Archive preserves that administration’s web presence as a vast trove of documents and webpages. The archive began in 2008, with George W. Bush’s second term, and runs up to 2024, collecting images, text, graphs, redacted pages and other […]

Dave Rupert: Finding curated public domain images. “I try to avoid indiscriminately (un-)splashing every post but the real reason for the infrequency isn’t radical self-control, it’s because dumpster diving for public domain images can be a chore…. That’s why –for me– a little for-profit curation goes a long way. I wrote down some of my favorite resources from my last search (so I […]

Silicon Snark: Social Search Cannon Makes Reddit and X Research Less Like Tab Punishment. “The product is Social Search Cannon, a free browser-based search launcher for Reddit and X. Type one question, choose a niche pack, edit the subreddit list if needed, and fire. The tool opens a spread of relevant Reddit searches in separate tabs. In X mode, paste multiple questions, one per line, and it […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Bing Tests Updated News Design In Search. “Microsoft Bing is testing a new updated design for the news section within Bing Search. The updated news box, honestly, is easier to understand and makes it clearer that these are news sources – so I kind of like it.”

Another blog finder/explorer that showed up in my RSS feeds: Minifeed. From the About page: “Minifeed is a curated blog directory, reader, and search engine. The goal is to collect blogs written by real humans, make them discoverable and searchable. Minifeed is created and maintained by Rakhim.”

Calishat: Super Edu Search, Powered By Diffbot. “Super Edu Search 1.0 aggregated sets of domains and presented them as Google search URLs because I can’t afford Google’s search API and that was a free workaround. But Diffbot’s API is free and so I can integrate its search results into the tool…. Since this result integration seemed like it would be useful to researchers, I added the […]

Apparently this launched several months ago but I just came across it: RawWeb. From the GitHub page: “We miss the golden age of the internet when people thought, wrote, and shared on their personal websites and blogs. That’s why we’ve built this search engine to help you discover and explore content from personal websites.”

Spotted in my RSS feeds: The Last Museum, a search engine for museum art. From the About page: “The Last Museum is the largest search engine for museum art. It uses semantic search, allowing you to search for artworks by theme, style, subject, vibes, or any description you can imagine. We currently have around 5 million artworks indexed, and strive to eventually index all museum art in the […]

Calishat: Upgrading BlogHiking.com: More Results, Site Muting. “I spent some time over the weekend working on my blog search tool Blog Hiking. I’m happy to report it’s more powerful than before and has a couple of new features.”

Bing Blogs: A Smarter Way to Explore Images Has Come to Bing. “Today, we’re introducing an evolution of Bing Image Search– a unique AI-guided experience that organizes results to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed, making it easier to find what you’re looking for. Behind the scenes, AI helps make this possible by automatically labeling and organizing images into clear categories and […]

Spotted on Reddit: SFWDOG, a search engine for subreddits. From the Reddit announcement: “I indexed every subreddit with more than 1k subscribers so you can easily discover new communities. Try it → https://sfwdog.com. Type any query into the search bar, or browse through categories like Lifestyle, Entertainment or just Vibes. Filter by subscriber count to find massive hubs or niche groups.”

Spotted in my RSS feeds: Archivarix Tube Search. From the About page: “Web pages, including YouTube video pages, are routinely captured and preserved by public web archiving initiatives such as the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) and Common Crawl. When a YouTube video becomes unavailable for any reason, the metadata that was previously captured by these archives — including titles, […]

Spotted in my RSS feeds: GovAuctions. From the About page: “GovAuctions lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you’re looking for.”

Mongabay: A search engine for the planet opens to the public. “Earth Index allows users to scan satellite imagery by visual similarity. A user can highlight an example—a patch of deforestation, a mining site, a trawler, or an airstrip—and instruct the system to find comparable patterns elsewhere.”

Search Engine Land: YouTube testing new search experience, Ask YouTube. “Google announced they are testing a new ‘conversational search experience to complement how you already search on YouTube.’ It is called ‘Ask YouTube’ and it lets you ‘dive deeper into the topics you’re curious about in a more interactive way,’ Dave from YouTube wrote.”

How-To Geek: Here’s an open-source Google Circle To Search alternative that works offline. “Aditya, the developer, has said that his Circle To Search does not require the internet for text recognition, and it can also detect QR codes, and does Smart Scan offline, without requiring uploading these images to Google servers, which is the case with Google’s version.”

Spotted on Reddit: Insights64, a search engine for chess positions. From the Reddit announcement: “I’ve been toying with this idea for a while and finally came around to it! Its a tool that let’s you find positions in real games (from Lichess only for now) based on specific pieces in the board or specific positional patterns.”

TechSpot: Google adds search to Play Store reviews to improve app discovery. “Most Android users rely on Play Store reviews to decide which apps to install. But sifting through hundreds – or even thousands – of reviews has rarely been convenient. Google is addressing that with a new search function that lets users find specific information within app reviews, a small but meaningful […]

Volkswagen Foundation: The Grants Database for our Funded Projects is Back. “Following a comprehensive overhaul, the Volkswagen Foundation’s Grants Database now features enhanced search functions and a clear, modern design.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Microsoft Bing Tests New AI Image Search. “Microsoft seems to be testing a new AI-powered image search interface and result set for Bing Image Search. If you do a search on Bing Images, on the right side you may see a button for ‘New Version.’ That new version says you can ‘try a new version of Image Search.'” Ick.