Google has made what I consider to be the terrible decision to go all-in on AI in search and there’s little I can do personally against that decision. 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 queries 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.
Upgrading Wikipedia Seismograph
Using Wikipedia Seismograph’s new zoom feature means you can explore over nine years’ worth of public interest data in any Wikipedia topic with one chart and easily turn it into date-bounded Google News searches.
The Calishat Jams of 2025: All Free, All Ad-Free
In 2025 I made 13 new tools for better search and content curation, using Google, Wikipedia, RSS, WordPress, and more. They’re all free and ad-free.
Wiki-Guided Google Search II
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a Wikipedia article, break it down by headings, do a word-frequency analysis on each block of text, and then click and toggle the most frequent/unusual words into a search box to build Google queries for that topic Well guess what!
Exploring “War-Torn” Portland With Local Search America
Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites. We’ll start with Local News TV.
A Use Case for TimeCake
People ask me sometimes for “use cases” for the things I make. It’s not something I think about too much — I need something, I create it — but this morning I found something that I think fits well so I wanted to share. Google announced yesterday a new local search app for Windows. When […]
Researching Public Figures in the Epstein Birthday Book, Part I: MiniGladys
MiniGladys is a collection of four Wikipedia-based research tools. In the time it takes for a few clicks and a few reads you can get background on Leon Black, for example, find major news stories linked to him, and discover topics related to him that you might not know about. Here’s how.
Blaugust: Four Tools for Easier Date-Based Searching
Do your Internet research tasks include a lot of date-based searching? I find that date-based searching helps a lot when searching historical (and man do I feel weird saying that about stuff that happened just a couple decades ago) events, companies, people and information. The results you’ll find when searching for something in its contemporary […]
Slicing and Dicing YouTube Searches Into Google Queries
I was doodlebugging around and made a YouTube-based Google query builder. It slices a topical query five different ways and builds a list of keywords for each set of results. (Unique ones are a different color and marked with a star.) Click on the keywords to add them to your Google query, the results of […]
Echo Chambers No, Everything Chambers Yes: Three Tools For Nook-and-Cranny Searching
Yesterday I wrote about making search spaces and got accused of making echo chambers. So today I’ll show you how to get into the EVERYTHING CHAMBER with 3 tools for randomish and nook-and-cranny searching.