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.
Local Search America Adds Local News Feed, Articles From 1K+ Sources Around the US
Local Search America has a new tool! Local News Feed gathers RSS feed items from 1003 local news sources across the US and aggregates them into one state-browsable, keyword-searchable bundle with associated topic pages.
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.
Exploring WordPress Blogs As A Series of Trails: BlogHiking.com
I wanted to search WordPress and find blogs that were more heavily covering the content I was interested in. I wanted to find a way to generate possibly-related keywords so I could build additional searches off the first one. The search offered at WordPress.com did not have all the features I was looking for, so I made my own and wrapped in a hiking metaphor. #WordPress #blogs #OSINT
Browsing and Searching Members of Congress: Congress Corral
Congress Corral lets you browse members of Congress via a number of filters and provides a page of details of useful links for each one, but lots of political directories do that. The magic happens with the four other tabs on the detail page.
#politics #LocalNews #Wikipedia
Putting Up a Rough Draft of Congress Corral
For the last week or so I’ve been working on a way to keep up with all the Members of Congress I see on TV as the government remains closed. I wanted to have a way to see all the Members in one place and catch up on them quickly. What I’ve got so far I’m calling Congress Corral.
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 […]