Yesterday for my Blaugust post I wrote about some tools I made for finding and searching news sources. Then as usual I posted the article to a couple of social media places, including LinkedIn.

And was rather taken aback when a couple of people accused me of making ECHO CHAMBERS, saying I was making it easier for people to stay politically polarized, contributing to the breakdown of western civilization, etc.

H’what?

First of all if I’m THAT influential over anyone I want a raise; I thought civilization-destroyers made a lot more money. Second, I wonder if they tried the tools at all? If I make a tool that shows you all the television stations serving a city, and you choose to search only the ones on the Fox network, did my tool constrain you or did you constrain yourself to an echo chamber? If I show you a way to find news sources on Wikipedia and then search them on Google, it’s your decision to search by loaded language instead of searching by location or neutral topic. You can build an echo chamber with my tools the same way you can with raw Google searches, but it’s not intrinsic.

Yeah this did make me mad as a matter of fact: after writing about how to find things online for 30 years it’s a slap in the face to be told that I’m trying to polarize people. It also makes me petty. So in today’s Blaugust post, we’re going from the alleged echo chamber to the EVERYTHING chamber. Here are three tools from Search Tweaks ( https://searchtweaks.com/index.html ) that will help you do randomish topical searches and poke into more Internet nook-and-crannies. All sixteen tools which make up Search Tweaks are free to use and free of ads including Smushy Search, Shuffle Search, and Sinker Search.

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

Sometimes you might find yourself doing topical searches that lead you to a lot of slick SEO-type results. The best remedy for that is a more detailed query, but sometimes you don’t know what keywords to add to a search or you’re just doing some general searching and you’re not ready to put in a lot of detail.

Smushy Search uses the Datamuse API to find words related to your query and add them randomly to your Google search, letting you do randomish searches: searches which are focused on a particular topic but which pull different sets of results because of the related, random words mixed into the query.

In the screenshot above the target word is “floods”. That is the word the Datamuse API will use to find similar words. In addition to the main query word, Smushy Search also lets you specify ancillary terms to add to the query along with the random words. In this case I’m adding government, “best practices”, “climate change”, “climate response”.

Once you click Smush Up A Search Query, Smushy Search will call the Datamuse API to find words related to the query term (in this case flood), will randomly insert four of them into a Google query, and open the Google search results in a new tab. It will also show you the words that Datamuse added to the query, like so:

This query reads: minor OR regular AND moderate OR ordinary AND floods AND government AND “best practices” AND “climate change” AND “climate response.” Let’s see what kind of search results it pulls up:

If you don’t like those results all you have to do is click the Smush Up a Search Query button again and the Datamuse process will repeat. Smushy Search is an easy way to do a lot of what I call “poking around” searching, when you’re trying to get a sense of a topic, people and words often mentioned, related concepts, etc.

Can you use Smushy Search with a person, place, or event? Yes, but you can’t use them as the main query word since the Datamuse API can’t find words similar to proper nouns. Instead, make the query word a major aspect of the proper noun you’re searching. Let’s use Blaugust as an example. I’ll make blog the main query and add blogging, Blaugust, and 2025 to the ancillary search terms. That gets me a nice set of results based on this query: (“video” | “favorite”) (“regular” | “internet”) “blog” blogging 2025 Blaugust -inurl:amazon -inurl:ebay -inurl:pinterest -intitle:”Shop for” -inurl:abebooks -inurl:walmart .

Blaugust is not as huge an event as it should be but Smushy Search still managed to find me a completely different set of results when I smushed up another query:

Smushy Search is a great choice when you have a general topic you want to search but you’re not sure what direction you want to go. But sometimes you know exactly

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

Did you know that you’ll get different Google results depending on the order of your query terms? Do a Google search for hairstyles 1970s “hot rollers” and then search for “hot rollers” hairstyles 1970s. You’ll see that you get different search results. When you shuffle your search terms what you get varies; sometimes results are completely different and sometimes with some page/site overlap. Shuffle Search takes a query of up to four terms and provides you with a list of a links to all possible Google search variations.

In the case of searching for something like Blaugust, you’re going to have a certain amount of overlap in your shuffled results, especially if you’re using 2025 or another year as a search term. If you find there’s too much overlap in your results, try making your query terms more general.

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

Does Sinker Search look familiar? I made something similar for Google Hacks back in 2003 but that was made in Perl and was a little awkward. This version is JavaScript and much easier.

But let’s talk about what Sinker Search does. Google has a query limit of 32 words. Most of the time you’re not going to use all 32 words in your search. But did you know that you can repeat terms in your query to tilt your search results in a certain direction? Sinker Search takes the unused space on your Google search and repeats one term in your query up to the limit of 32 words. That term is the “sinker” which weights your search in a certain direction. In the screenshot above I’m focusing on the flooding aspects of climate change and climate response, and my search results looked pretty good in that direction.

If you want to put some random into your topical searching or wring more results out of your queries, give Smushy Search, Shuffle Search, and Sinker Search a try. Enjoy the Everything Chamber!