All the blah-blah is below, but here’s what I’m working on right now:

SearchTweaks —   SearchTweaks is a collection of 17 tools to make the Google search experience better, covering time utilities, Wikipedia-guided search tools, and more.

Local Search America — Three tools for finding information by city/state, DMA (Designated Market Area), or city radius. Find authoritative sources like local governments, institutions of higher education, and FCC-licensed television stations and search their web spaces on Google.

Congress Corral — Explore members of Congress via a Wikipedia-enriched dataset. Includes a public interest analysis utility, a tool to explore member news across local news and colleges, and a Wikipedia-powered related topics feature.

RSSGizmos — Hurrah for RSS! It’s an amazing tool for keeping up with information online and I literally could not do my job without it. This is a collection of ten RSS utilities, including a tool to find RSS feeds on Wikipedia and another to create keyword-based RSS feeds for a dozen sources.

MegaGladys — MegaGladys aggregates several tools for searching Wikipedia people and presents them in one interface. Also does some Wikipedia-based analysis of groups of people.

MiniGladys — A faster, easier to use, more streamlined version of MegaGladys. I keep this in a browser tab and it has replaced 90% of my Google quick reference/lookup searches.

WikiTwister — WikiTwister is a collection of nine tools designed to explore Wikipedia pages and categories. Not as person-oriented as MegaGladys, focused on page analysis and Wikidata extraction.

Blog Hiking — Blog Hiking lets you explore WordPress blogs by following trails of interconnected content. Search by keyword and find WordPress posts from across the web, organized like hiking trails with three different ways to explore.

Tube Terrain — Tube Terrain lets you browse lists of YouTube channels built from Wikipedia categories. Filter by keyword, subscriber count, video count, channel age and more!

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.

MastoGizmos — I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, but I started moving away in November 2022. Now I spend a lot more time on Mastodon. I’ve made a collection of tools that for browsing and searching Mastodon across the fediverse, along with a couple of utilities for RSS and Wikipedia integration.

ResearchBuzz on GitHub — A bunch of random scripts/bookmarklets/etc I’ve made for various things. At the moment it’s Mastodon-heavy.

Welcome to ResearchBuzz. This has been my online home since 1998. In 1996, I wrote the first edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research. In 1998, when working on the second edition, I decided I wanted to a blog to keep up with the changes. That’s how ResearchBuzz got started. (If you want more background on me here’s an interview with Robert Berkman. In the last year or so I have moved the personal stuff to Calishat.com.)

All these years later it is, as you might expect, pretty much impossible to keep up with all the new resources in the world of search engines, online databases, digital archives, etc. But I try. I’ve got over a hundred Google Alerts and an RSS feed reader packed to bursting. Twice a day I post digests of what I find. You can see a list of the latest over on your right. You’re welcome to subscribe via e-mail (also over on the right) or grab the RSS feed (the RSS feeds are full-text.)

If you’re more interested only in specific topics, please check out The ResearchBuzz Firehose, which is items posted individually instead of in digest. I’ve written an article explaining how you can use it to monitor your topics of interest without having to go through a lot of extraneous material.

I also publish articles about how to find things and do things online.

Please visit my articles on learning search.
Please visit my rant articles.
Please visit my news articles.

If you dig what I do, please consider supporting me on Patreon. And remember: everything on the site is CC BY-NC-SA. If you want to reprint an article or a resource writeup for your class or in your nonprofit’s newsletter, it’s cool as long as you give attribution. If you want to put it on your site and slap ads all over it, or put it in a magazine with advertising,  that’s not cool.

I hope you enjoy the site, and I hope in browsing it you find resources that are useful to you and will make your life better. Thanks for visiting.

(We like Mastodon!)