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The Philadelphia Inquirer built Scrape, an AI tool to surface hyperlocal news

18 points · 9 comments · giuliomagnifico

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  1. syntaxing · · focus · HN ↗
    I like this so much. Maybe I’m romanticizing but hoping tools like this give local news a chance against monopolies like Sinclair Broadcasting.
    1. cyanydeez · · focus · HN ↗
      It'll merely generate hyper local bots that generate hyper local slop. The media landscape is downhill.
      1. binarymax · · focus · HN ↗
        Are search summaries slop?
        1. ginko · · focus · HN ↗
          Yeah
  2. mmooss · · focus · HN ↗
    > Early on, the team tried to balance quality with the high cost of searching many small, scattered sources. They discovered that prompting can implicitly control search depth and behavior, but only after trial and error.

    I don't understand the cost here. The number of sources should be relatively tiny - it's not a general Internet search. The amount of data scraped would seem to be relatively tiny - how much data is there on suburban-county, PA?

    1. Proofread0592 · · focus · HN ↗
      I’m just guessing here but I would think the recent paywalls added to social media APIs might cost a good amount. If you’re surfacing news from twitter, instagram, TikTok, etc, all that access is paid now.
    2. tclancy · · focus · HN ↗
      I think it’s more about how many different types of content you’re looking at. Public google calendars, Facebook event pages, personal sites, etc.
    3. mrweasel · · focus · HN ↗
      [delayed]
      1. thephyber · · focus · HN ↗
        Agree that the permutation becomes a problem, but the organization should be super simple: the state mandates the use of some standard index file format for all municipalities governments, not unlike how sitemap.xml works for a website index.

        There is a community-run project that standardizes each election's results across states, counties, and precincts. It could be a template for local info releases.

  3. calvinmorrison · · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mincedgarlic.org&#x2F;inky.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mincedgarlic.org&#x2F;inky.png
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