“CivicSearch is a search and discovery tool for everything that is said in local government meetings, texts, and laws. It covers 545 cities and towns in the US and Canada. Included is recent content from LocalView, a data set of transcripts from city councils and other local government bodies around the US. The data is… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Search Engines
Axel Springer vs. Google
Fortune: “Axel Springer is at Google’s throat again. The German news-publishing giant (for which I worked in my days at Politico) has a long history of battling Google over the issue of so-called ancillary copyright fees—payments for carrying snippets of text and thumbnail images in search results. But now it’s waging war on another front:… Continue Reading
ChatGPT Tutorial – How to use OpenAI’s AI Tool (with Images)
ChatGPT is an excellent tool with hundreds of uses, for work and play. We show you how to get started with the AI chatbot. [h/t Pete Weiss] In this guide: How to Sign Up for ChatGPT for Free How to Use ChatGPT Prompts How to Create Images in ChatGPT How to Manage How ChatGPT Uses… Continue Reading
10 Reasons You Should Switch From Chrome to Firefox
How To Geek: “Key Takeaways Firefox provides many advantages over Chrome, including being more efficient, so your laptop battery lasts longer. Firefox doesn’t track your internet activity for advertising purposes. Firefox has better privacy controls, including container functionality and VPN, enhancing your privacy and security online. Google Chrome is the most popular web browser by… Continue Reading
Google Chrome’s new AI can finish your sentences for you
The Verge: “Google has started rolling out “Help me write” — an experimental Gemini-powered generative AI feature for its Chrome browser that aims to help users write or refine text based on webpage content. Following the stable release of Chrome M122 on Tuesday, the new writing assistant is now available to try out on Mac… Continue Reading
How Google is killing independent sites like ours
And why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google. “Google regularly launches updates to its algorithm to continuously improve search results quality. Think of these updates as a refresh of the system where rankings change: some websites see an improvement while others see a decline. At HouseFresh,… Continue Reading
Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.
The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; read free] “Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale,… Continue Reading
Does anyone even want an AI search engine?
Fast Company: “You’ve probably already noticed your search engines are starting to evolve. Google and Bing have already added both AI-generated results and conversational chatbots to their respective search engines. The Browser Company, a startup that made a big early splash thanks to its mission statement of building a better internet browser, has launched an… Continue Reading
This Tiny Website Is Google’s First Line of Defense in the Patent Wars
Wired: “TDCommons is a free space for inventors to lay claim to breakthroughs without having to file a patent. Why is it so off the radar? A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a… Continue Reading
Old’aVista
Remember the search engine Altavista? (I sure do). Via Wikipedia: “AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On… Continue Reading
Translate a webpage with Firefox
“One of the best things about the internet is that we can access content worldwide. Whether it’s news articles, blogs, or even a review of your latest tech gadget, you can find it all on the seemingly never-ending web. With Firefox’s latest translation feature, this tool will continuously translate a webpage in real-time. While other… Continue Reading
The Top 100 Documentaries We Can Use to Change the World
Films for Action: “Documentaries have an incredible power to raise awareness and create transformative changes in consciousness both at the personal and global levels. Over the last [16] years, we’ve watched hundreds of social change documentaries and cataloged the best of them in this library. There are now so many that we realized we needed to… Continue Reading
