It’s another thing to see how the results of that lopsided election look on a map. Each teal-colored area represents a victory for Medina’s challenger, Monica Ramirez Alcantara:

Bexar County primary for Democratic Party chair

Every registered voter in Texas lives in a voting precinct — a distinct neighborhood or geographic area. Election results for each precinct are available to the public, which means you can plug those numbers into a spreadsheet, add some formulas, and create nifty interactive maps that show which candidate won each precinct.

Related: Interactive map shows how Bexar County voted in the 2016 presidential election

I made these maps in Google Fusion Tables. Zoom in on your neighborhood, click on your precinct, and see who the voters in your area supported.

After last week’s election, we focused on maps of Medina’s race and a few others. Winners of each election carried the teal-colored precincts:

Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood: Lost to Joe Gonzales in the Democratic primary

Texas House District 118: Incumbent Tomas Uresti lost to Leo Pacheco

Bexar County Commissioner Paul Elizondo: Forced into a runoff

Medina told me on Election Day that much of the Democratic turnout was driven by new voters, many of whom were unhappy with the presidency of Donald Trump.

But as my story with political writer Jasper Scherer noted, some of Medina’s critics complained that Medina himself was guilty of sounding like Trump in his own campaign rhetoric. Alcantara said she heard that complaint from Democrats.

“Our constituents wanted change,” she said. “I believe they could see through all of the rhetoric that was going on. I think they used this opportunity to have their voices heard.”

The post Interactive maps: How Bexar County voted in the 2018 primary elections appeared first on John Tedesco.

Texas weather can be wild and dangerous, as Hurricane Harvey is showing us this week, so here are some techniques that have helped me track the impact of storms, floods and other natural disasters in San Antonio and other parts of the state:

Weather forecasts and warnings

The National Weather Service provides so much useful information it’s hard to know where to start. For Bexar County, I usually check the service’s detailed “zone” weather page, which provides a snapshot of current conditions, forecasts and hazardous weather warnings.

Zone forecasts are available for all counties — you can find the ID number for your zone in this list of Texas counties. The list includes links to RSS feeds and profiles for each zone. Click on a profile, and you’ll see all current weather watches, warnings or advisories for that particular zone.

I follow my local office of the National Weather Service on Twitter and turn on mobile notifications when the weather turns bad. The forecasters in your area use Twitter to provide a steady stream of updates and weather data.

ICYMI: Here's a short summary of the peak winds & highest observed rain totals from #Harvey.

For a full listing: https://t.co/4vep1s1DY4 pic.twitter.com/omNlaa5C60

— NWS San Antonio (@NWSSanAntonio) August 29, 2017

AccuWeather Platinum is the best smartphone app I’ve found to keep track of the weather. It not only tells you when it’s going to rain in your location, it predicts the intensity and duration. It also offers an interactive Doppler radar map.

Google provides a real-time, interactive map of public alerts for a wide variety of emergencies.

Measuring rainfall

The National Weather Service offers hourly weather observations, including rainfall totals, for the past three days at the San Antonio International Airport, the main site for weather stats in Bexar County.

The weather service also compiles archives of observations and data for the San Antonio area, and it issues public information statements with more rainfall totals, river flooding and other statistics.

Floods and traffic

Bexarflood.org provides an interactive map of low water crossings and their current status. You can sign up for alerts when a crossing closes or opens. The city of San Antonio also posts emergency street closures.

The Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service offers an interactive map of current and predicted river levels. Each site on the map is color-coded to show where major flooding is expected to occur.

TexasFlood.org, a state website, provides a similar river-level map that lets you add additional layers of data, such as weather advisories and Doppler radar images. You can set up an account and sign up for email or text alerts when specific gages show a river or creek is flooding.

Drive Texas is a map provided by the Texas Department of Transportation that shows current traffic conditions on Texas highways and roads. The map shows any flooded roadways.

Rescues and emergency responses

The San Antonio Fire Department’s “active calls” page shows a list and location of emergencies firefighters are responding to, including high-water rescues.

Broadcastify provides a digital feed of police and firefighter radio traffic at departments across the United States. The scanner traffic is available on its website and through a smartphone app.

The Texas Department of Public Safety provides daily situation reports about any emergency conditions in the state and how officials are responding. The reports cover everything from hurricanes to droughts.

CPS Energy provides a map showing the location of current power outages in its service area and the number of customers without power.

Did I forget anything? Contact me or leave a comment below if I missed any useful resources and I’ll be sure to add them to the list.

The post Web tools to track weather, flooding and natural disasters in Texas appeared first on John Tedesco.

I discovered the usefulness of this feature when I edited video clips of our epic annual family road trip to Colorado. In between time-lapse videos of the drive, I added highlights of the main stops we made at state and national parks. Most of that video footage came from my smartphone, an LG G5.

As you might expect, the hand-held videos were shaky — even with the phone’s internal stabilization feature. When I got home and started editing the clips, I noticed the stabilization option in Google Photos. I tried it out and was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Related: How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

For each video you want to stabilize, you open the Google Photos app on your phone, tap on a video clip, and then tap on the “edit” option that looks like a pencil. You’ll see the “stabilize” feature at the bottom of the screen. Tap that, and you’ll have to wait a few moments, depending on the size of the video, for the app to stabilize your video.

It magically transformed my shaky footage into videos that looked like they were shot with a tripod. The end result was a slightly cropped video that might have a bit of warping in the image, depending on how it was shot. But I didn’t notice much distortion in the footage I shot.

For anyone who spends a lot of time shooting video with their smartphones, such as journalists, this could be a handy tool that irons out annoying shakes and leaves mostly smooth, professional looking footage. Stabilize each clip, add it to your video-editing software, and you’re all set for your next news story or family adventure.

The post A handy tool for journalists: Stabilize your shaky smartphone videos with Google’s photo app appeared first on John Tedesco.

But even with this new technology, transcribing interviews from digital files hasn’t changed from the days of my ancient tape recorder. Even if I use my phone or a computer, I still have to hit play, type a snippet of what I hear, hit stop, rewind a little bit to my best guess of where I left off, and repeat the painful process all over again.

A new, fee-based service called Trint is trying to drastically streamline transcribing. And if you have quality audio, it does a pretty slick job.

“Getting the content out of recorded talk is still stuck in the 1960s or ’70s,” said Jeff Kofman, Trint’s CEO and co-founder who sat down for an interview with me via WebEx at Trint’s office in London.

In his former life as an award-winning foreign correspondent, Kofman was intimately familiar with the archaic, time-consuming problem of transcription. Working in television, Kofman often needed to grab just a few key soundbites out of a long interview, but it took precious time tracking down those quotes in his audio.

“In my 30-plus year career, all the technology has changed,” Kofman told me. “The whole workflow has been transformed in ways that we could never have dreamed in the 1980s — except this one part of the journalists’ workflow, which is how do we get the content out of our interviews?”

Related: Go back in time with Cogi to capture fleeting moments

Trint tries to solve that problem by automatically generating a transcript of your recording. The transcript syncs with your audio. When you play the recording in your browser, you can follow the transcript “like karaoke,” Kofman says, and edit any transcription errors directly in the browser. No more ping-ponging between your audio player and Word document.

Here’s how it looks:

Proofreading an existing transcript can be a lot faster than transcribing from scratch. I used Trint to quickly find and snag key quotes from my interview with Kofman. I read the transcript and highlighted quotes that stood out for me. I listened to the recording to make sure the quotes were accurate. From there it was a simple matter of copying and pasting them into WordPress.

Trint — a combination of the words “transcription” and “interview” — offers various monthly plans but you can sign up for a free trial to test the techie waters. Plans start at $15 a month for an hour’s worth of recordings. If your files are longer you can continue to pay a quarter per minute as you go, and any unused minutes rollover to the next month. Kofman said this is a competitive price compared to professional transcription services.

“The whole point is to make it accessible,” Kofman said. “This is disruptive technology and it’s about making it easy to get a content and share.” 

Getting started with Trint

 For my interview with Kofman, I didn’t use the audio from the WebEx recording — it was terrible. Kofman recorded himself on his iPhone and uploaded the video file to Trint, which can work with all kinds of video and audio files. He then shared the file with me in a process that’s like sharing a Dropbox folder.

For Trint to work well, clear audio is crucial.

“If you’re holding your iPhone 10 feet from the person giving the news conference, it’s not going to work,” Kofman said. “I mean, it’s really important to set expectations. Garbage in, garbage out. Good audio equals really good transcripts.”

Kofman said the most frequent complaint about Trint is that it fails to provide an accurate transcript. But in many cases, he said, the problem can be traced back to a poor recording.

Depending on the length of your file size, Trint can take a few minutes to prepare a file after you upload it. I recently uploaded a 19 minute, 23 second interview to Trint, and its transcript was ready to go within seven minutes.

I didn’t find many errors in Kofman’s transcript. (Ironically, Trint often failed to transcribe the word “Trint.”) You’ll have to keep an eye out for punctuation — Trint does periods but not commas and other types of punctuation. You’ll have to add those yourself.

When you work on a transcript, the text is front and center. To the right are your play and pause buttons and the video feed, if you’re transcribing video. Running across the bottom of the screen is a horizontal bar showing where you’re at in the recording. Click on the bar, and you can jump to that portion of the recording.

Trint offers several shortcuts:

• Hitting “Control” and the space bar plays or pauses the audio.
• “Control R” rewinds the recording five seconds.
• Outline some text and hit “Control H” to highlight a portion of your transcript. When you do that a yellow section appears on the bar at the bottom of the screen. Click on that yellow section and it will take you to that portion of the highlighted transcript. There’s also a “play highlights” button that will play audio only for those sections of the transcript.
• Outline some text and hit “Control S” to create a strikethrough and skip over a portion of the recording — if that’s your preference. The audio player will omit that section, and a grayed-out block appears on the recording bar.

You can set preferences in a menu in the bottom right corner of the screen:

In that same area is a “playback speed” option, which lets you slow down or speed up the recording.

In the upper right-hand corner are export options. These are handy. You can export your entire transcript in formats that include Microsoft Word or a zip file that combines an html file with the transcript of the audio recording. You can also email others to invite them to your Trint file.

Trint also gives you the option of exporting only your highlights, which I used to write this post. It created a Word document of everything I thought was potentially useful from my interview with Kofman, complete with time stamps. Nice. 

Observations about transcribing

Kofman said Trint takes security and privacy very seriously, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s a cloud service.

“We’re very sensitive to that,” Kofman said. “We are encrypted end to end. Our goal is to get the International Standards Organization data security certification. It’s a one to two-year project. You don’t do those kind of things overnight. It’s a really, really laborious and time consuming and resource sucking project and it’s very much a priority.

“So you know, I’m very honest,” Kofman added. “If you’ve got the next Edward Snowden, I would be cautious.”

When I first tried Trint last year I thought it was buggy. When I tried revising a transcript, Trint screwed up my typing and introduced errors. I initially wrote it off as a glitch in a beta product and assumed the company would work it out.

What I didn’t realize is that Trint works, but some Chrome plugins interfere with it. When I emailed Trint last month to ask what was causing the typing bug, Kofman himself replied and said deactivating plugins for Evernote or Adobe usually does the trick. And it did. I also found going to “incognito mode” in Chrome resolves the glitch.

It might have been my Internet connection but sometimes when I moved the cursor to a spot in the transcript and hit play, Trint lagged for a while before playing the audio. Hitting “Control R” to rewind the audio five seconds works but the shortcut itself is a little clumsy — I kept having to look down at the keyboard to make sure I was hitting the right keys.

I often use another transcription tool called oTranscribe, by Elliot Bentley, which uses the “escape” key to play audio and pause and rewind five seconds. Hitting escape is more intuitive. As I was working on the interview of Kofman’s transcript, I also craved an annotation feature to jot notes to myself.

Kofman said annotations and the rewind shortcut are things the development team will be looking at as they work on Trint 2.0, which he said will be offering new collaborative features that will make it easier to share content. 

Future plans for Trint

 “We’re developing what we call the Trint player, which will allow you to take an interview, a news conference, a lecture, clean it up and actually put it on your website so that it instantly becomes searchable,” Kofman said.

The Trint player is scheduled to be released sometime in mid-2017. It will allow readers to outline a soundbite and share that segment of transcript and audio to social media services such as Facebook and Twitter.

“Right now if you put a 20-minute interview on your website or in your archive, it’s dark data unless there’s a complete transcript,” Kofman said. “You don’t know what’s on it. What we do is shed light on that dark data because we actually allow you to find it and to access that content quickly and then put it on your website and make it SEO, search engine optimizable. Suddenly we can drive traffic to that news organization or a corporate Web site or education web site, which is really important.”

Other plans include one-click captioning, which will automatically bake the captions of your choice into a sharable video. This could be a huge time-saver as subtitles become so important in Facebook feeds.

“That’s a fundamental innovation of Trint,” Kofman said. “We allow you to highlight a moment and send that because we glue the audio to the text.”

What about a smartphone app? Kofman said he recognizes there’s demand for a mobile app but for now Trint will remain a browser-based tool as his team focuses on core features.

“A smartphone app is very much on our road map,” Kofman said. He’d like to see an app that would let people record an interview, then upload it directly to Trint from their device. 

Conclusions

 Critics might complain that Trint fails to provide transcripts that are 100 percent accurate. Trint appealed to me because no matter how accurate a transcription service claims to be, I still have to listen to it myself to make sure every quote is accurate before I use it in a news story or, in this case, a blog post. Trint simply makes that process easier.

And it really shines when you’re looking for something specific — that golden soundbite you vividly remember but can’t quite find in the recording. In Trint, it’s as simple as typing “Control F” in your Windows browser to find a keyword and quickly pinpoint it. This feature alone can be a real timesaver.

“I had a reporter with one of the NPR affiliates tell me she had six hours of interviews for a long feature she was doing,” Kofman recalled. “And she said normally that would be two days of transcription for her. She would just lock herself away and type away. She said she uploaded it to Trint and she got it back in less than an hour and she came in the next morning and she went through it. She knew her material. She was able to scan and search it and she said she had the entire story written before lunch.”

Not surprisingly, news organizations rank high among Trint’s major clients. Early corporate accounts included ESPN, Vice News, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Fast Company came to do an article on us. They’re now one of our biggest users,” Kofman said.

But Trint’s appeal goes beyond journalists. Kofman was surprised by its growing popularity in academic circles — researchers and students who have to conduct hours of interviews and make sense of them.

“I would say education in general is probably about a third of our market,” Kofman said. “And that’s with no marketing effort whatsoever.”

Trint is a small but growing company that’s expected to double by summer from 10 to 20 employees and open a new North American office. It’s received grants and investment money from the Google Digital News Initiative and the Knight Foundation’s Enterprise Fund. Cisco Systems, the company behind WebEx, sponsors Trint’s work space at IDEALondon, an innovation lab in Shoreditch in East London.

“We’re sponsored here in London, England by Cisco because Cisco sees huge application in the corporate world for corporate communications as the audio gets better,” Kofman said.

It’s no accident that Kofman, as a former journalist, immediately recognized how useful something like Trint could be when he met the original development team.

“The team teases me and calls me ‘Beta Tester No. 1,'” Kofman said. “And it’s true. I have lived the problem.”

After 30 years in the news business and learning how to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances in far-off places like Libya, Kofman is using those skills in the tech world as an entrepreneur, asking lots of questions, learning as he goes, working long hours — and having fun along the way.

After seeing what Trint, in its early form, could do, Kofman said he didn’t have much choice but seize a rare opportunity. In 2013, Kofman was still working for ABC News teaching a global journalism program for U.S. and Canadian students studying in London. A friend urged him attend Mozfest, a big media coding conference that happens in London each November.

“That’s where I met three brilliant developers who are the core of Trint’s tech team,” Kofman recalled. “They were demonstrating a transcription experiment that glued manual transcription to the original audio.”

Impressed with what he saw, Kofman asked Laurian Gridinoc, now Trint’s senior developer, if it could work with automated speech-to-text.

“Interesting idea,” Gridinoc replied. “We could try it.”

“I remember saying, ‘This is the future,'” Kofman said. “Either we team up and we make it happen or we’re going to be sitting in a coffee shop five or 10 years from now looking at someone doing something like that saying, ‘You know, I remember talking about that but we didn’t do it.’

“And I just thought, we’re going to do it.”

The post How to transcribe with Trint: An interview with CEO Jeff Kofman appeared first on John Tedesco.

Everyone’s needs are different. But for me, Evernote really shines as a vast, searchable archive that allows you to comb the full-text of every web page, document, photo or note you’ve saved, and find what you need in seconds.

Here’s how it works. When you type some words in Evernote’s search box, you’re not just searching the titles of your files. You’re not just searching the tags of your photos. You’re searching the entire contents of everything you saved in Evernote. This even applies to anything you take a picture of that has words, such as business cards, thanks to Evernote’s sweet optical character recognition capability.

For people like journalists who work on deadline, this can be incredibly useful for quickly finding a needle in a haystack.

Related: Go back in time with Cogi to record fleeting moments

Evernote isn’t perfect — its desktop app can get sluggish and I get frustrated with it sometimes. But I realized how powerful this tool could be when I worked on a story about the family history of Johnny Manziel several years ago. I used Evernote to save every article, court record and web page I came across during the course of my reporting. Then, when I was writing the story and had to look up something, I could use Evernote to instantly search the entire text of those files.

An example: I came across several old news stories about the friendship between Manziel’s great-grandfather, a wildcatter and boxer named Bobby Joe Manziel, and heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.

Manziel retired from boxing and moved to East Texas in the 1930s to try his luck in the oil fields as a wildcatter. Almost broke, Manziel asked Dempsey for some money to drill for oil in Gladewater.

The well was a gusher. Dempsey later said that gamble was the smartest investment he ever made.

But there were discrepancies in the stories I found about how much Dempsey invested. Some said $400. Others said $700. Well, which was it?

Enter Evernote. I searched for “Dempsey” and the varying dollar amounts in my Evernote files and all the relevant articles popped up. It didn’t take long to determine that the older, more contemporaneous stories claimed Dempsey invested $400. One article quoted Dempsey directly. Problem solved.

Related: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists in 2017

Now imagine life without Evernote. I would have had to reread a pile of photocopied articles looking for any mention of that investment.

Is it possible? Sure.

Was Evernote a useful tool that totally sped up the process?

Absolutely.

I wouldn’t upload sensitive files to a cloud-based app like Evernote. But for the vast majority of information you rely upon in your day-to-day life, Evernote can transform those records into a vast archive that’s instantly searchable — and instantly more useful.

The post What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files appeared first on John Tedesco.

The good news is, there’s a statewide system in Texas to track how often people die in police custody. The bad news is, no one is taking responsibility to make sure the reports are accurate or even filed at all.

When I started working at the Express-News eons ago in 1997, one thing I learned as a cops reporter is that Texas law requires police departments to file a report with the Attorney General’s office every time someone dies in police custody.

The reports are available to anyone who asks, and under the law, the definition of “custody” includes police shootings.

Those “custodial death” reports came to mind this summer after two Bexar County deputies fatally shot a combative suspect, Gilbert Flores, moments after he raised his hands above his head in an apparent attempt to surrender. A bystander, Michael Thomas, recorded the shooting on his cell phone, sold the video footage to KSAT-TV, and it became a national news story.

The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office and the Bexar County district attorney refused to release any records about the shooting. Since custodial death reports are filed with the Attorney General’s office, I bypassed the sheriff’s office and filed an open records request with the AG for the custodial death report for the Flores shooting.

Missing information

When the AG’s office emailed me a copy of the report, there was a gaping hole. At no point did it mention that Flores had his hands raised when he was shot. The sparsely worded narrative stated:

Officers were dispatched to 24414 Walnut Pass for a family violence call. Suspect attacked the officers with a knife and was shot by the officers after the suspect refused to drop the knife. Suspect resisted arrest.

Maybe it’s not surprising the sheriff’s office didn’t include that pertinent fact. But the omission raised a basic question: What exactly is required of a law enforcement agency when it files a custodial death report, and is anyone making sure the information is accurate?

Police accountability

A few Google searches and phone calls taught me a lot more about the law and the history of custodial death reports. For example, Texas law requires a “good faith effort to obtain all facts relevant to the death and include those facts in the report.” It’s a misdemeanor if the agency files the report but fails to include “facts known or discovered in the investigation.”

Related: Web tools and apps to track weather emergencies in Texas

Using the eminently valuable website of the Texas Legislative Reference Library, I tracked down who wrote the law and learned it was a former Bexar County lawmaker named Walter Martinez, who filed his bill in 1983 to help the public learn more about custodial deaths.

“At the time, a pretty energetic prison reform movement was going on in the state,” Martinez told me. “We really didn’t know what the record was with regard to deaths while in custody.”

When Martinez’s bill became law, it set up a potentially useful resource for anyone researching police use of force in Texas. But how well did law enforcement agencies actually follow the statute, and did they ever face any repercussions for failing to follow it?

Those questions led to this news story:

The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office failed to file at least five state-mandated reports about people who died in police shootings since 2005, was late in filing a dozen more fatality reports and left out key details about two deadly shootings involving deputies.

The missing details include how one suspect had his hands raised above his head when two deputies opened fire. In another case, a report didn’t quote a deputy who can be heard on dash-camera video saying, “He started attacking me and I shot him.” The deputy then swears, saying either “Fuck him” or “Fuck it.”

Sheriff’s spokesman James Keith noted that the five missing reports of fatal shootings all occurred before Sheriff Susan Pamerleau took office Jan. 1, 2013. During her tenure, four custodial death reports were late. Keith blamed that on a misunderstanding that’s been cleared up.

“The investigator didn’t have a clear understanding of the law and the requirement that these had to be submitted within 30 days,” Keith said.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office doesn’t take any steps to make sure law enforcement agencies are being diligent in filing the reports.

“We are simply a repository for this information,” spokeswoman Katherine Wise wrote in an email when asked if the attorney general’s office has any system in place to flag late reports.

While the AG doesn’t check how often reports are filed past the 30-day deadline, there’s a simple way to find out by using the agency’s own data.

You can request a copy of a large spreadsheet the AG compiles from the custodial death reports submitted by law enforcement agencies. This is a lot more detailed than what the AG posts on its website. Out of 4,250 death reports filed in Texas since 2005, the records show that law enforcement agencies filed nearly 700 reports — 16 percent — after the 30-day deadline. Some reports were more than two years late. Here are some examples:

Late custodial death reports in Texas

Late report

In Bexar County, a report that was more than a year late was filed with the attorney general’s office Nov. 26, 2013. It described how Sgt. Frank Bellino had responded to a call Oct. 14, 2012, for a possibly intoxicated man who was walking along Culebra Road and creating a hazard for passing drivers.

The report says the unarmed man, Joe Guerra, 19, became aggravated and refused to obey instructions. “He charged at me,” Bellino was quoted as saying, and Bellino opened fire. Guerra later died at a hospital.

I learned a lot about this case from a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Bellino and the sheriff’s office by Guerra’s family. Their lawyers unearthed dash-camera footage from a patrol car that recorded Bellino moments after the shooting explaining what happened.

“He just went fucking nuts on me,” Bellino told a fellow deputy. “He started attacking me and I shot him.” Bellino then can be heard swearing, saying either “Fuck him” or “Fuck it.”

Sean Lyons, a lawyer representing the Guerra family, told me there’s no question that Guerra was inebriated, but he disputed claims that Guerra was in any condition to fight. The custodial death report in Guerra’s case was not only a year late, he said, but paints an inaccurate picture of what happened.

“You’re basically learning the opposite of what went wrong,” Lyons said of the report. “Because the report goes out of its way to make it sound like Bellino did all he could to de-escalate the situation and that Guerra was the aggressor, when in fact, Bellino immediately threatened Guerra’s life, threatened to fucking shoot his ass, and used escalating language.”

Keith declined to answer most questions about the case, citing the litigation against the sheriff’s office. But he did say the office believes that the custodial death reports are supposed to be a general account of what happened.

“The thought is, the investigation is still ongoing, you’re not going to know every single answer, every specific detail within that 30-day time period,” Keith said.

Martinez, who served as a state representative from 1983 to 1985, said the law governing custodial death reports might need to be revised and strengthened to clearly show who’s responsible for making sure the records are accurate and filed on time for the public to review.

“If no one’s following up or taking responsibility for ensuring that it’s done, then there’s a break in the chain,” Martinez said.

The post Police reports about people who die in custody are late, missing in Texas appeared first on John Tedesco.

As the Uber Tech Lead at Google, Dan studies how people search the web. He started sharing little-known search techniques three years ago at the IRE conference in Boston. Since then he’s annually offered tips at IRE that can help everyone — not just reporters — find exactly what they’re searching for online.

Here are some of Dan’s new strategies and tools for 2014, and a recap of the most useful tips from his past presentations that I’ve used myself. You can check out posts about his other talks here and here.

Go back in time

One of the coolest new tools offered by Google this year allows you to jump in a time machine in Google Maps’ Street View.

Let’s say you’re walking around downtown San Antonio and you’re curious about the site of a historic building on Commerce Street across from Main Plaza. An inferno destroyed the building a few years ago and now there’s nothing but a vacant lot:

In Google Street View, click on the clock symbol in the corner of the screen to check out how that spot looked over the years. In this case, you can look at what the Wolfson Building looked like before the catastrophic fire:

The Wall Street Journal used this time-machine effect to illustrate dramatic growth in Brooklyn.

The cool thing about this is how you can pan around and get different perspectives of the sites you’re interested in.

Gallery of Google Map Mashups

The Google Maps Gallery allows organizations to mesh their data with Google maps. All these mashups are searchable, and Google links to the original sources if you want to download the information yourself.

Let’s say you’re curious about which counties in the United States are prone to tornado strikes. A search of “tornado” in the Google Maps Gallery shows a map based on federal data showing tornado strikes, total property damage, injuries and deaths by county:

Wildcards in Google Maps

(Update: Google dropped this map feature, which is a bummer. It was extremely useful and I hope they bring it back.)

Type an asterisk in the search bar of Google Maps and it will show you every business and significant, named place it knows about in the area you’re viewing.

If you plan on using any of this information in a news story, you’ll want to take steps to confirm what you’re seeing in the map. But this is a really quick way to get a sense of what’s in the area.

For example, if you’re writing about the Wolfson Building fire and want to get a quick idea of what businesses were nearby, in Google Maps, focus on the site on Commerce Street and try the wildcard search:

Force Google to search for certain words

By far the most common search function I use in Google is “intext,” which Russell discussed at his first presentation in Boston.

Sometimes Google tries to be too helpful. It changes your search terms and uses words it thinks you’re searching for– not the words you’re actually searching for.

And sometimes the websites in Google’s search results don’t include all your search terms because Google decided those pages might still be relevant.

That might be OK for general searches. But it’s not very helpful if you’re looking for pages with specific terms or words with unusual spellings. How do you make Google search for those exact words?

Typing intext:[keyword] (with no space on either side of the colon) might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Dan’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website.

If you’re researching the story of the Wolfson Building, for example, you’ll probably want to make sure that Google always includes that unique name in the search results. Typing intext:Wolfson San Antonio will force Google to include the term “Wolfson.”

Intext also works with phrases in quotes. So typing intext:”Wolfson Building” will strong-arm Google into showing you that exact phrase.

To learn more details about Google’s search operators, check out my post about his talk in Boston where he gave us a treasure-trove of advice.

Customized site searches

Google’s site search let’s you search for information on a particular website. Typing site:mysanantonio.com “Wolfson Building” would show pages with that phrase that were published by the San Antonio Express-News. But what if you wanted to regularly check what other local news outlets published in the San Antonio area?

Google can focus on multiple websites with its custom search engine. You tell Google which websites to search, save your settings and Google creates a link to the custom search page. Now you can search those specific websites any time.

This technique is handy for anyone interested in a particular beat or issue. I created this customized search of San Antonio media and blogs to quickly see how news organizations are covering a story. You can also sort the results by time or relevance, and conduct an image search with the terms you want on those websites.

Control F is your friend

Not everyone knows this so it’s worth repeating: Type “Control F” in Windows or “Command F” on a Mac to launch the “find” function in your browser to locate a specific word or phrase on any web page. It’s faster than reading the whole page if you’re looking for something in particular. “If you don’t know this, you’re roughly 12 percent slower in your searches,” Dan said at the IRE conference in Boston.

This year, Dan said useful Chrome extensions expand the usefulness of the “find” function. Let’s say you want to find more than one word. You could type an expression such as Wolfson|Building|Fire to highlight all those words. Handy.

Dan regularly blogs about search strategies by challenging readers with puzzles. It’s a good way to stay in practice. And practice, Dan says, is the best way to hone your search skills.

The post New search tips for 2014 from Google research scientist Daniel Russell appeared first on John Tedesco.

Russell posed a riddle:

What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped?

Let that sink in. He wasn’t asking for a phone number for the skyscraper in the picture, which sounds hard enough. He wanted the phone number of the precise office where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken.

Nothing in that office was even in the photo. Yet in a few minutes, Russell, a research scientist at Google, revealed the answer by paying attention to small details and walking us through a series of smart Google searches.

“Once you know these tricks, you can solve problems that look impossible,” Russell said.

There are plenty of Google search cheat sheets floating around. But it’s not often you get to hear advice directly from someone at Google who offers you his favorite search tools, methods and perspectives to help you find the impossible.

Here are some of my favorite tips shared by Russell at the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. Some of these techniques are powerful but obscure; others are well-known but not fully understood by everyone.

Most of what you know about Boolean is wrong

Don’t bother typing AND in your search queries – Google treats it like any other word.

But OR in all caps actually works. OR is great for finding synonyms and boilerplate language. Typing “Smith denied” OR “Smith claimed” OR “Smith argued” will find more pertinent websites about the controversy involving Smith.

Avoid using NOT if you want to exclude a search term. Instead, type a minus sign in front of the word. So if you’re visiting San Antonio but don’t want to visit the Alamo, type:

“San Antonio” -Alamo

That will search for the phrase “San Antonio” on web pages that don’t have the word “Alamo.” There’s no space between Alamo and the hyphen.

Think about how somebody else would write about the topic

Search is all about someone else’s language. Think about synonyms and use OR operators. Google’s “related search” feature on the search page also offers suggestions.

“Part of the skill here is being fascinated about language,” Russell said. “You’ve got to think about equivalent terms.”

Use language tools

Knowing which words to search for means understanding their meaning. Typing define [space] [search term] in Google search will offer dictionary definitions. “‘Define’ ‘space’ ‘word’ is your friend as a writer,” Russell said. “Trust me on this.”

You even get a definition if you type define pwned and other lingo. “That means we have words that aren’t in the dictionary,” Russell said.

What if you know descriptions but not the actual word? Find one of the many reverse dictionaries online. Type the descriptions you know and you’ll get the matching words.

Use quotes to search for phrases

Typing “San Antonio Spurs” will show you the websites with the phrase “San Antonio Spurs.” If you don’t use the quotes, Google will search for the terms “San,” “Antonio,” and “Spurs” individually and you might miss pages related to the basketball team.

Force Google to include search terms

Sometimes Google tries to be helpful and it uses the word it thinks you’re searching for — not the word you’re actually searching for. And sometimes a website in the search results does not include all your search terms.

How do you fix this?

Typing intext:[keyword] might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Russell’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website. So if you type:

intext:”San Antonio” intext:Alamo

It forces Google to show results with the phrase “San Antonio” and the word Alamo. You won’t get results that are missing either search term.

Minus does not equal plus with Google

Russell didn’t talk much about this but it’s worth noting. Since putting a minus sign in front of a word removes it from a search, many people, including me, incorrectly assumed that adding a plus sign in front of the word forced Google to include it.

Actually, that search operator simply stops Google from changing the word into a synonym or correcting the spelling. It’s still possible that Google will drop the word from some search results, so it’s different from intext:.

(After Google Plus was unveiled, Google dropped the plus sign operator and replaced it with double quotes. Typing “Alamo” is now the same as +Alamo.)

That’s not to say the plus sign — now double quotes — is not a useful search operator. But note how it’s different from intext: If you want to force Google to include an exact word or phrase in all your search results, use intext:.

“Control F” is your friend

Use this keyboard shortcut to find a word or phrase on any web page. It’s faster than reading the whole page for a specific word or phrase. “If you don’t know this, you’re roughly 12 percent slower in your searches,” Russell said.

Limit the time frame

If you only want search results for web pages published in the past week, past month, or some other time frame, you can click on that option on the left-hand side of the search results page under “Show search tools.”

Search by region

If you only want web pages for a particular area, you can search by region on Google’s advanced search page.

Find relational search terms

What if you’re curious about search terms that are near each other on a website? [keyword] AROUND(n) [keyword] is incredibly handy for finding related terms such as “Jerry Brown” near “Tea Party.” (“n” is the number of words near the search terms.) Typing “Jerry Brown” AROUND(3) “Tea Party” will show you all the websites where the phrase “Jerry Brown” was mentioned within three words of “Tea Party.”

Google maps as a search tool

(Update: Google dropped this map feature, which is a bummer. It was extremely useful and I hope they bring it back.) Let’s say you’re searching Google Maps for hotels in San Antonio for next year’s IRE conference and check out the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel:

This screen shows the “hotel” search in Google maps. But what if you want to know what’s near the Marriott?

In the Google Maps search bar, type an asterisk. The results will show you every single place Google knows about in that map view. So you can see nearby businesses, stores, and whatever else is around:

Now you know where to find — or avoid — the Denny’s across the street.

Restrict your search to a specific website

The search operator site:[url] restricts your search to that particular website. It’s one of the most useful searches out there. I used this when I worked on a story about racehorse accidents and wanted to search the Texas Racing Commission’s website for any mention of injuries. Typing injuries site:txrc.state.tx.us led me to a little-known state database of accidents that showed how, in a five-year period, 300 horses had died on Texas racetracks.

Find a particular type of file

Typing filetype:[extension] is useful for limiting your search to particular types of files, such as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, pdf’s, Word documents and just about any other file type you can imagine. Typing filetype:xls in a search will show only spreadsheets. It’s incredibly useful for finding public data. Check this list for file extensions you can search for.

Think like a reporter

When Russell teaches his students search skills, he tells them: “Think like a reporter.” What do you know, and how can that information help you find what you need to know?

A big part of a journalist’s job is knowing where to find information. Which state agency regulates the issue you’re interested in? How might that information be documented? Who would know more about the issue?

“You have to have a concept about what’s possible,” Russell said.

Time travel technique

Typing cache:[url] or clicking on the cache function in the search results will show you an older version of the website. Handy if the site owner takes something down or edits it because of a brewing controversy.

Mashup search

Computer-savvy journalists create interactive maps of public data. Searching for the term “mashup” and the issue you’re interested in will show you what’s already been published and might give you some good ideas.

Stay up to date

All these search terms work with Google Alerts. Google will email you whenever it crawls new websites containing terms you’re interested in.

“This is a very good thing because you can now follow a topical area,” Russell said.

Search your own browsing history

Visit Google.com/history to search your past searches. Handy if you vaguely remember a search but forgot the details.

See what the world is searching for

Google Trends shows queries people are doing over time and how they compare.

Beyond YouTube

As popular as it is, YouTube is a subset of all the video services indexed by Google. Searching video.google.com searches every service, not just YouTube.

Google Public Data Explorer

Search and analyze public data in interactive charts that you can share online:

Try a Google diagram search

If you’re looking for a part of a machine or gadget but don’t know the name of it, try including the term “diagram” in your search. A search for “bicycle diagram” gives you tons of images with parts:

Combine these Google methods to make awesome sauce

You can use all these search operators together. So let’s say you’re curious about what kind of forms and documents the city of San Antonio has posted online. You can type:

site:sanantonio.gov filetype:doc

This is a cool way to find interesting story ideas.

Epic image search

Sometimes, you don’t even need to type words to search Google. Upload a picture of an object, place or other type of photograph you want to learn more about, and Google can search for similar images. Google might find a match and it offers relevant search terms for that image. This video walks you though it:

Use what you’ve got

So how exactly did Russell figure out the riddle of the office phone number?

The first step is using the available information in the picture, as scant as it might be. Scrutinize the image and see if you can pinpoint any telling details. There might be a clue.

Still stuck? Check out the answer at Russell’s blog, where he regularly quizzes people about riddles that aren’t so impossible after all.

Updates with more Google search tips from Daniel Russell:

• More awesome search tips from Google expert Daniel Russell, with real-world examples
• New search tips for 2014 from Google research scientist Daniel Russell

The post How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques appeared first on John Tedesco.

Local weather watchers have been dutifully documenting San Antonio’s temperature, precipitation, and other climate data for 140 years. If you’re curious how this year’s drought compares to past dry spells, meteorologist Robert Blaha with the National Weather Service has done you a huge favor.

Blaha helped dig up old climate records and published monthly rainfall totals for San Antonio going back to 1871. I stumbled across this interesting piece of the city’s weather history while helping out with a story about the drought, and I made this interactive chart based on the data. (There are a few gaps in the rainfall totals in the 1800s, so the chart starts at a nice round number — the year 1900.)

“We were able to find the records,” Blaha told me. “In the 1800s, they hand wrote (the climate data) in ink. It was in a paperback book. When I came here in 1975, they were in notebook format. In 2050, they’ll be in the format of that day.”

Blaha said the rainfall gauge in San Antonio has changed locations over the years. In the early days it was at a co-op station and then moved to Fort Sam Houston. In 1891 it moved to a downtown office building. Somewhere along the line it was at Stinson Field. In the 1940s it moved to the San Antonio International Airport and stayed there ever since.

Related: Web tools and apps to track weather emergencies in Texas

All that work helps us compare this year’s drought to past dry spells. This year, we’ve received 5.6 inches of rain so far in San Antonio. That’s about half the total precipitation for the lowest year on record since 1900, when it rained 10 inches in 1917.

In 2010 it looks like we got quite a bit of rain –37.4 inches. But click on the monthly figures for 2010 and 2011. The data show that September 2010 was our last significant taste of rain.

In the nine months since then, we’ve barely gotten anything.

(Photo credit: Terry Shuck on Flickr)

The post Just how bad is the Texas drought? View San Antonio’s precipitation data from 1900 to 2011 appeared first on John Tedesco.

But where are all these newcomers moving to within Bexar County?

Kelly Guckian, database manager for the San Antonio Express-News, pulled together more detailed population figures from the 2010 Census to help show where Bexar County is gaining residents — and where it’s losing them.

Kelly focused on census tracts, which are geographic boundaries set by the Census Bureau that encompass, on average, about 4,000 people. This allowed her to zoom in on population changes at the neighborhood level. She did the tedious work of compiling and mapping the data, and I helped export it into this interactive Google map that shows how the far West and North sides of the county saw explosive gains in the blue areas, while many inner city neighborhoods in the yellow areas lost residents.

Related: Web tools and apps to track weather emergencies in Texas

Kelly and graphic artist Mark Blackwell also produced maps showing the population trends broken down by race and ethnicity, and MySA’s Mike Howell put it all together in an interesting package online.

The explosive growth on the county’s outskirts occurred during a decade when city officials emphasized the importance of living near downtown and limiting urban sprawl. Our news story about the Census numbers explored why many people either didn’t hear the city’s message — or ignored it.

The post Interactive Census map shows population trends in Bexar County and San Antonio appeared first on John Tedesco.