Search by Year (1995+) and State News Sources: Peabody Search

It seems like every day you read about some new fake web site or site network spewing disinformation or AI slop into Google results. One of my strategies for getting around this search crud is restricting my search to authoritative sources, like FCC-licensed outlets, or known resources, like NPR stations. But Google makes this difficult. To the best of my knowledge you can’t get a list of outlets being indexed by Google News and the location syntax hasn’t worked in years. I felt this keenly when I wanted to do some research on Troy Jackson and the other new candidates for the US Senate after Graham Platner dropped out. I didn’t want to just throw Troy Jackson’s name into Google to get what I get. I wanted to be able to search Maine news sources between 2018 and 2024 (when Jackson was president of the Maine senate) for mentions of him. So I made Peabody Search, named after Mr. Peabody and his Wayback Machine. He could set his time machine to go to a particular year and place, and…