The latest news from our Federal government is that Portland Oregon is some kind of dystopian hellscape which requires the gentle hand of the National Guard to restore order. I have never had the pleasure of visiting Portland but it’s been due to lack of resources rather than fear.

I have been following Portland events but I have not been directly searching Google or Google News. Instead, I have been using Local Search America to find local news, government, and institutions of higher education and search their Web spaces. There is so much slop and information warfare detritus and other nonsense on the open web that I’ve been focusing on creating limited search spaces from authoritative sources. Those spaces don’t always have enough information for my needs but they can always give me enough useful facts that I can take a more detailed query to the open web (and hopefully avoid a lot of infosewage.)

Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites. We’ll start with Local News TV.

Local Search America: Local News TV

Local News TV uses the FCC database to find television stations within a given DMA (Designated Market Area, basically a metro area.) It then uses YouTube RSS feeds to pull the latest news from each station and make it available in the browser Choose a state and then a metro area to get started. In this case, I could only find one TV station on YouTube in the Portland area. (Yes, I went through all the FCC TV stations and hand-searched for their channels on YouTube.) Here’s what Medford-Klamath Falls looks like:

You can filter the content shown by general (politics, weather, crime) or custom keyword filters. If you see anything interesting (like the story on local officials’ reactions to current events) you can click the Watch button and a little view panel will open under the story listing. You can immediately play/watch the video unless the channel doesn’t allow embedded content.

I couldn’t find many Portland TV stations on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you can’t search those Web spaces on Google. For that you’ll need the next tool, called Local Search America (the first one I made and the one I named the site after.)

Local Search America / Local Search America

Local News TV uses DMA. Local Search America does too but it allows you to specify a city a state when searching. Local Search America will look up the DMA that city belongs to, then finds you the TV stations, government agencies, and education institution web sites in that area.

Each type of listing has its own section, with a few details and a checkbox for each listing. You can select up to 25 to bundle into a Google Search.

I’m going to add a few government sites and all the local television stations I can find. Once I’ve selected the web sites I want to include in my Google search, I’ll go back up to the search box and enter my query. Note you can date-restrict your search in a number of ways. I’m going to restrict my search to the last week and choose as my query “National Guard.”

When I click “Create Google Search,” a Google search results page will open in a new tab:

Restricting your search to TV station web sites means you’re restricting your site to FCC-licensed sources. The kind of information you’ll find in a restricted search to licensed sites in a specific geographical area is going to be way different from what you get from a search of the open web. In this case you’re seeing reactions from local officials, local actions in the form of protests, etc.

Since Local Search America finds all the places in a DMA, an area which is generally metro-sized, it’ll find a lot of places. If you really want to narrow down on an area, you want to use CivicRadius Search, which focuses on finding government web sites within the radius of a city.

Local Search America / CivicRadius Search

CivicRadius Search takes a city and states and shows you all the government web sites within a specified radius. Searching for sites within 3 miles of Portland Oregon finds ten:

Unlike Local Search America, where you search sites in bundles, CivicRadius Search searches on government web site at a time. Start by filling out the Google query form at the top (notice you can date-restrict the search here as well, or you can search across a custom year-span.)

Once you’ve filled out your search query, browse the list of found government sites below. Clicking on the green Search Site button will open a Google search result in a new tab. I searched for “National Guard” for the last week.

There are still plenty of reasons to search the open web; I’m not saying abandon it completely. But when there are things happening in a clearly-delineated area — whether that be city or metro area or even county — look into how much you can restrict your web search to authoritative sources in that area. You might find that you can learn what you need to know without risking the open web.

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