As you might imagine I’m not thrilled with Google’s decision to go full-in on AI. Even if Google’s AI consistently worked well enough to ensure minimal misinformation exposure and maxmium public safety (I do not believe it does), I would have concerns about Google’s turn. First I do not believe this change is good for publishers and I think it will impact clickthrough rates to publisher detriment. (This is already happening.) Second, I worry the change of interface and reduction of search to a chatbot will narrow searcher horizons and make it more difficult to explore and learn. The friction of searching — the going through results, the evaluating sources, the aggregation of information — that’s where the learning happens. I do not believe prechewed AI pap will either nourish your mind or assist your learning.

I believe you deserve easy paths to useful information in the same way you deserve clean food and water. That’s the line at the top of this blog and I mean it. It drives me crazy the limitless number (it seems to me) of search structures and ideas that Google and other search engines seem to be ignoring in favor of pursuing an expensive (on many fronts) technology that I do not believe will ever work with a high level of consistently in its current form.

There’s little amount I can do to oppose Google’s decision directly because it is a $4+ trillion dollar company and I am an autistic old woman by myself. Still, I can make alternatives. I can express my ideas in tools that I share with you. I can at least try to hold space for the idea that there are ways to perform search and create search spaces that Silicon Valley does not offer, and maybe those ways are worth your time (they’re certainly worth mine.)

Here are three search tools you might want to try in place of Google’s turn to AI. They are all free and ad-free.

For quick reference and official link searches: MiniGladys

How many of your daily Google searches are quick hits to find a Web site link, or confirm a public figure’s name spelling, or just to get a little background on a name you heard? You can perform many of those type of searches on Wikipedia. MiniGladys makes it easy.

MiniGladys is a Wikipedia front-end which spotlights official links like web sites and social media accounts, which makes it super quick to find an official web site or confirm a celebrity’s real Facebook fan page (as long as their PR firms are keeping up their page, that is. And as it’s 2026 I certainly hope they are.)

The site also offers a tool to make keyword-generated RSS feeds for Wikipedia articles and other one to find related topics. You’ll also see a tab called Gossip Machine. Gossip Machine is a tool to find periods of increased public interest in Wikipedia topics and turn them into Google News searches, but instead of recommending that one (which was designed for quick use) I want to show you the more powerful Wikipedia Seismograph.

For getting background information on public figures: Wikipedia Seismograph

Did you know that Wikipedia has publicly available page view data for each article? It’s been aggregating since around 2017. That page data is very powerful because Wikipedia is so popular; the appearance of topics and people in the news will cause a wave of people doing Wikipedia searches to get more information about them, spiking the views.

That means you can think of Wikipedia’s page view data as fossilized attention; a record of when public interest in a person or topic was most active. Wikipedia Seismograph analyzes that data and creates a graph of spikes in public interest that a user can turn into Google News searches in just a couple of clicks. Using public interest data to create date-bounded search spaces means you’re creating small pools of information which ideally will bring limited but information rich results.

I use the Seismograph to get the backstory on figures in the news. Suddenly Senator So-and-So is in the news for whatever reason. I’m not familiar with them. With Wikipedia Seismograph I can go back nine years and easily find news or information that would have made them a topic of public interest. Using the Seismograph is a lot faster than doing a general Google search; I can generally catch up in a few minutes unless someone’s been acting really crazy. This tool makes date-bounded Google News search links but if it gets awful and AI-ified I will switch to another search engine.

The same goes for the Wiki-Guided Google Search (I & II) — once Google goes back I will unhook them and create search URLs for a different search engine. The heavy lifting to create the search is done by Wikipedia.

For guided topical search without AI: Wiki-Guided Google Search (I & II)

A big problem with topical searches on general search engines is that you’re going to get an overwhelming number of results. You can narrow a search down by adding related keywords, but if you’re ignorant of a topic you’re going to be ignorant of additional keywords!

Wiki-Guided Google Search I finds related topics across Wikipedia for any Wikipedia article and offers you Google and Google News links to search those topics (as I said, I will rework these tools for another search engine.) Wiki-Guided Google Search II, shown below, is a little different.

WGGS II breaks Wikipedia articles down by header, identifies the most popular words in each section (by counting, not by AI) and then lists them by section. Building a Google search from them is as simple as clicking on them until the query form looks right to you and then clicking the Search Google button. Think of Wiki-Guided Google Search I as a tool to break general topics into sub-topics, and Wiki-Guided Google Search II as a tool to develop queries around very specific aspects of a topic.

As long as there are search engines offering link-based results, I will make search alternatives. And if all the link-based search engines go away, I already have a few ideas about making my own (specialty, not general.) AI has a place in searching but it should be the condiment and not the main course!