Local news just got that little easier to find on Twitter. The micro-blogging site has exploded over the last 2 months and with it a seemingly inexhaustible supply of information.

Below is a list of local news services on Twitter… enjoy.

This is the original post is started to write when I went on a rant about Google Search killers, sorry about that. Here is a more succinct post abut what I’d like Google to provide.

Power Search

Let me know in the comments of power search features you’d like, but 2 that would be useful for me would be; ‘ip4:’ and ‘ip6:’. A query of:

ip4:17.149.160.49

This would return results form this IP address 17.149.160.49 (’ip6:’ is the IPv6 equivalent).

Spell Checker

As you might of guessed my speling sux. It’s a combination poor typing skills and dyslexia. So the thing I love most about computers is the spell checker. Apple make my life easier too by providing a build in spell checker for any Cocoa application. But by far an away the best spell checker I have ever used is Google, so much so that I will often find at the end of a day 10 or so window open with search for; ‘avaibule’, ’sussinct’ or ‘priverlage’.

A handy widget or API for this would make me happier than a gay dyslexic at a pianist convention.

Upgrades

There is a lot of technology in Google that doesn’t quite work. Take the ‘related:’ command, supposedly it list pages and site that are, well, related to a site you specify. It only works for a handful of sites and then with curious results.

I recently had an discussion* with a colleague about why Google rules the internet. We were having our bi-monthly discussion (like all start ups do) about how we’d love to launch a search company; “we’d do it some much better”, “our interface will be way cool”, “think of the money”.

“A little top down thinking about crazy projects is light relief in these hard times and I actively encourage it, my secret hope it it might plant the seed of a future project the will wipe out my student loan once and for all.

My argument was along the lines of, 1. Anyone can collect data and store it for search and 2. What makes Google the best is the way the molest your query and give you what you want not what you asked for. This is why when you type in “june sarpong” you don’t get any calendars or things happening in June. This, my argument continued was the USP the thing no one else did as well or at all.

“What You Want, Not What You Think You Want should be Google’s new mantra they could shorten it to they snappy WYWNWYTYW, say it with me, W, Y, W, N, W, Y, T, Y, W!

You’d think with Microsoft desperate to get any sort of traction with their online real-estate, Yahoo! Fucked! they would e trying hard to out do Google in the search space. This week however I was checking the server logs (as I do every Monday morning) and I noticed something strange, Google as usual was the Number 1 spider on our servers but second was Cuil! Imagine my surprise.

“Figures from Net Applications show that Cuil had a market share of less than 0.01 per cent in October.

Microsoft and Yahoo! the respective Number Twos in online search aren’t even out-indexing a poxy start up like Cuil. You might not be able to compete on search power but at least have the courtesy to provide you dwindling user base with up-to-date results!

“Google’s profits were up 17% to $1.21bn (£608m) for the three months to the end of December, 2007.