At the beginning of March I made Non-Sketchy News Search as an attempt to answer the problem of news search in Google being less productive than it used to be. A combination of bad SEO and scrape-and-spit sites put up for the ad revenue means at times you can find yourself wading through a sea of garbage when you’re doing news search. AI and the proliferation of propaganda and disinformation-oriented sites is only going to make the problem worse.

The original version of NSNS was my ham-handed attempt to find and organize media sources via Wikipedia API calls, and since keyword searches got WAY too many results I had to limit it to category.

It KIND of works, but it’s kludgy, and searching by media source is awkward in a market you don’t know. I’ve never been completely happy with it.

Over the weekend Curly and I tried a different tack – using SPARQL instead of API calls. Because of SPARQL queries requiring a type of entity to look for, this version of NSNS is not quite as wide ranging in the type of media it finds, but it can search by keyword instead of source and pulls a good number of results. So now there’s  Non-Sketchy News Search v2, available at https://searchgizmos.com/nsns2/ . Because of the differences in how the two programs find media sources, they produce different-enough results that I’m leaving them both up. NSNS v2 is definitely less kludgy to use, though, since you can search by keyword instead of source name.

Using Non-Sketchy News Search v2

NSNS has two inputs. The first is the keyword you want to use in finding media sources. Do not use quotes for this part or it won’t work. The second part is optional and is for any additional words you want to add to the Google query. You can use any Google syntax you would normally use with Google here except site:.

After you click the Search News Sources button, NSNS will chug for a moment (how long depends on how many matches your keyword got) and then presents you with a table of media sources matching your keyword. This is a partial list of the results for Florida – it’s too long to show completely.

Each source has a checkbox beside it. Click the checkboxes of the sources you want to bundle into a Google search (you can choose up to 15) along with your optional extra keywords. Then click the Generate Google Search button. NSNS will assemble your chosen domains into a Google search and open it in a new tab.