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

MegaGladys — Set of tools for learning about people listed in Wikipedia.

RSS Gizmos — Tools for making and using RSS and OPML files.

Mastodon Gizmos — Tools for searching, browsing, and using Mastodon.

SearchTweaks — A set of tools for making Google search better.

Search Gizmos — I think you can get better search without using AI and I’m making tools to do it. Mostly a holding pen for tools until they get their own site.

Nosy Raleigh — Aggregating and enriching open data about Raleigh, North Carolina.

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 or visit 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.

In mid-2022 I began learning JavaScript and shortly after that started creating little tools to address search questions that have bubbled up over the years. In October 2022 that turned into a new Web site: ResearchBuzz Search Gizmos. There are 60 gizmos available with two sites spun-off as of July 2023 and hopefully I will remember to update this at some point.

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!)