I learned so much overhauling WikiTwister that I immediately came up with several ideas for improving SearchTweaks, my collection of 16 web-based tools for making your web search better/easier/more interesting. After a very busy few days I have uploaded the new version and I’m delighted to share it with you. SearchTweaks is free to use and free of advertising. It will probably work on your phone but was designed for desktop/laptop. Here’s a rundown of the tools.

Query Builders: 100% AI-Free!

Wiki-Guided Google Search: https://searchtweaks.com/wiki-guided-search.html

Sometimes you want to do a topical search on Google, but you don’t know too much about the topic. That gives you the choice of doing a general search or trying to gain more knowledge another way before tackling a Web search. WGGS gives you another option: using Wikipedia to find ancillary concepts related to your topic and building them into Google searches. The new version of WGGS adds autocomplete to the Wikipedia topic form so you don’t have to look up the exact Wikipedia page title: just start typing!

Clumpy Bounce Topic Search: https://searchtweaks.com/clumpy-bounce.html

Clumpy Bounce works a bit like Wiki-Guided Google Search but focuses on finding pages grouped around a similar topic. Enter a Wikipedia page title (like Wiki-Guided Google Search, this form has autocomplete) and you’ll get a list of categories that page belongs to. Specify a page and you’ll get a list of the fifteen most popular pages in that category. (Clumpy Bounce will process up to 5000 pages in a Wikipedia category.) Choose up to three pages to “clump” together and “bounce” into a Google search. The idea is to find pages built around a group of similar topics instead of a single-topic query like Wiki-Guided Google Search.

Smushy Search: https://searchtweaks.com/smushy-search.html

Sometimes you want to add a little variety to your Web search results. You don’t want completely random search results, but you would like results that are more … randomish. Smushy Search is here to help! Smushy uses the Datamuse API to insert related words into your search query and create similar but unique Google search queries to find different sets of results.

News-Related Search Tools

Google/Bing News Query Builder: https://searchtweaks.com/news-query-builder.html

Last year Google experimented with removing the links to its News search results, which prompted me to knock together this tool. The News Query Builder simply builds a set of time-based Google News and Bing News searches for your query. It even includes RSS feeds for each resource so you can monitor your topic in addition to searching it.

Non-Sketchy News Search: https://searchtweaks.com/non-sketchy-news.html

Sometimes when you use a general news search engine, you don’t get the results you want. The problem isn’t your keyword, it’s that the sources that are filling your results getting you where you need to go. Google doesn’t let you choose the news sources to search, so I used Wikipedia to make an alternative. The Non-Sketchy News Search lets you keyword-search Wikipedia for news sources and group them into a Google search using the site: syntax.

US Local News Search: https://searchtweaks.com/local-news-search.html

It has made me crazy for a long time that there’s not an easy way to do local news search in America. I mean, we have an FCC license database and we have Wikipedia, it’s certainly possible.

So I made one! US Local News Search uses the FCC license database to find the television stations serving the city and state you specify. Further, it also finds newspapers and NPR stations serving the state. You can select up to 25 of these local news sources and bundle them into a Google search.

Time-Related Search Tools

Back that Ask Up: https://searchtweaks.com/back-that-ask-up.html

What’s a search tool without a silly name? Back that Ask Up makes it easy to remove recent days, weeks, months, or years from your Google News searches. This comes in handy when someone makes the news but you’re trying to get more of their backstory. This tool quickly removes recent news results, making it easy for you to dig into the lore.

TimeCake: https://searchtweaks.com/timecake.html

Want to do some historical Web search? Make a TimeCake! TimeCake has you specify a starting and ending year along with an interval span. With that information it generates a set of date-bounded Google searches. This is really useful when you’re doing historical research, especially from the dotcom era. (Y’all remember when Amazon bought a 50% stake in Pets.com? Wheeeeeee.)

Obit Magnet: https://searchtweaks.com/obit-magnet.html

If you’re looking for historical or common-name obituaries, an open-ended web search can be an exercise in frustration. Obit Magnet builds date-bounded searches around a death date, generating search URLs for obituaries across a 7- and 15-day span after death. Cuts search results way down. I have found some interesting results for historical figures using this.

Software VerSearch: https://searchtweaks.com/versearch.html

Searching for historical software information online can be very frustrating, so I made Software VerSearch. This tool uses the endoflife.date API to get version information on over 350 software projects, lets you specify a version, and builds Google and Google News searches across the time when that version was supported.

Search Utilities

WP has suddenly decided I can’t upload screenshots. I’ll fix that when I can, but in the meantime, let’s finish up.

No Shop Sherlock: https://searchtweaks.com/no-shop-sherlock.html

No Shop Sherlock is a Google search filter that offers a few different ways to eliminate clutter in your search results. Use the dropdown menu to choose one of four different filters: General Cruft, Online Bookstores, Social Media, and Video Sites. The tool uses negative queries and pattern matching to remove as much crusty content from your search results as possible. Bonus: the queries are sufficiently complex that I rarely see AI overviews in these search results.

Super Edu Search: https://searchtweaks.com/super-edu-search.html

Super Edu Search takes higher education institution information from the Department of Education (via the College Scorecard API) and lets you apply it to a Google search. Did you ever want to search the Web space of all the public universities in Indiana? Or all the HBCUs in the country? Or maybe all the Baptist institutions in Texas? Now you can.

Shuffle Search: https://searchtweaks.com/shuffle-search.html

Did you know that Google will give you different search results depending on the order your query words are? Shuffle Search has you enter a query of up to four words, “shuffles” them through all possible combinations, and generates Google search URLs for each one.

Sinker Search: https://searchtweaks.com/sinker-search.html

The last time I checked, Google’s query limit was 32 words. But how often do you need to use all 32 words in a query?  Sinker Search takes a query and a word to be emphasized in the search – the “sinker” that weights your results a certain way – and builds a Google search containing the query once and the sinker term as many times as it will fit inside Google’s query limit. If your sinker is overwhelming your search results you also have the option to do a “half-sink” with a little less emphasis.

Carl’s Name Net: https://searchtweaks.com/carls-name-net.html

Carl’s Name Net (named after longtime Patreon Carl – hi Carl!) takes a name and optional keywords, generates a set of name variants (for “John Paul Smith” you’d get John Smith, Smith John Paul, JP Smith, etc) and builds search URLs for Google, Google Books, Google Scholar, and Internet Archive. For the Google searches, it creates two sets of searches: one for common name variants, and one for uncommon. (If you don’t specify a middle name, you’ll only get one set of name searches for each resource.) 

The Anti-Bullseye Name Search: https://searchtweaks.com/anti-bullseye.html

Most names in English are expressed in news articles and other places like this: Firstname Lastname, or possibly Firstname Middlename Lastname. However, it isn’t the only pattern used when writing a name. The Anti-Bullseye Name Search takes a name and generates a Google search that searches for the name in reverse order (Lastname Firstname) and specifically excludes the most common expression of firstname lastname. It changes the tenor of the search results completely, surfacing many more legal- and data-based results.

I’ve got several more tools I want to add to the site, but I had to do the overhaul first. Stay tuned for updates!