Seventeen Years of the S&P 500, Comic Search and Cleaner Topics

Published: 2026-10-17

Big Whale Hunting's market cap bubbles can now play back seventeen years of the S&P 500, and there's a video of it. Issue Infinity has search, Your News Headlines has tidier topics with a chart for each one, and Galazon has a new walled warehouse. Here's what changed this week.

Big Whale Hunting: the market cap timeline

Last week I said I'd been collecting weekly market cap figures going back to 2009 and had something in mind for them. This is it. The market cap page on Big Whale Hunting now has a timeline. Press play and the bubbles grow, shrink, appear and disappear week by week from the end of 2008 to today, as companies join and leave the S&P 500. You can drag the slider or change the speed, and if you click a company its card follows it through the years. A small chart of the S&P 500 index sits beside the bubbles, so you can see where in the market's ups and downs each week falls.

Here's the whole thing played back:

Two smaller changes: searching the company table now puts the best name match first, so "bank of america" finds Bank of America at the top instead of buried among companies that just hold its shares. And the table of about 14,000 company directors has moved to its own directors page, which makes the home page much lighter.

Issue Infinity: search and series images

Issue Infinity now has a search box at the top of every page. It finds series by name and doesn't care about case, accents or punctuation, so "spiderman" finds Spider-Man. Exact matches come first, then series whose names start with what you typed.

Every series also has its own square image now, cut from the top of one of its covers. They show at the top of each series page, as tiles on the publishers page and in search results, and above the series name on each issue. Issue pages also have a set of small share buttons in the corner for copying the link or posting it to X, Bluesky, Reddit or Facebook.

Your News Headlines: cleaner topics and a chart for each

Your News Headlines tags every headline with the people, places and organisations it mentions. This week went on making those topics better. On a computer, each topic page now has a chart of how often it's appeared in the news over time. Topics no longer get split up by small differences in wording, so "the" at the start and "'s" at the end are dropped, while names like McDonald's keep theirs. Old links to topics that have been merged into another one now take you to the right place instead of the home page. I can also block a topic that's just noise so it never comes back.

There was a short outage too. I tried a bigger language model for spotting names in headlines, and the small server ran out of memory and fell over. I rolled that back, then moved the tagging out to its own service so the server has room to spare. I also cleared out a few stray headlines from years ago that feeds kept serving up, and stopped BBC's generic red "BREAKING" card from being used as a headline picture. There are two new posts on the blog: one about topics and the most used ones so far, and one about sharing stories.

Galazon: a walled warehouse and better balance

Galazon has a new Warehouse 4, so the PC campaign now has seven. This one has two walls cut into the floor, leaving a narrow passage between the two halves, so you have to plan your routes around them. The warehouses with crate factories now show the next few incoming trucks in the corner, so you can see what's coming and get ready for it.

I also worked on the money side. Moving to the next warehouse now costs a lot more, but the quarterly bonus grows every time you earn one, so it's something you save up for. The HR bot warns you when you won't have enough cash for your next loan payment, and the final review shows how much you paid back and how much you still owe. The manager has 26 new bits of corporate-speak for your quarterly review. Space debris and gold crates turn up half as often as they did, and trucks in the first warehouse no longer get impossibly fast later in the run.

And the rest

Diende's saved list search now stays usable with the keyboard open on Android. On my personal site, gerardkeating.me, the side projects are now a list with a short description of each, and it links to this blog.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading.