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.
Digging Out From The Deluge of AI News And Turning It Into Another Newsletter
For the last few months assembling ResearchBuzz has been increasingly frustrating. AI news was crowding out most of the other categories and I felt like the newsletter itself was getting much too AI-heavy. Things finally came to a head when I found myself with a 6200-item RSS backlog and 50 articles in my newsletter queue, […]
Getting a Grip on My RSS Flow With Keyword Filtering and Anthropic
I love my local news RSS feeds and you’ll have to pry them from my cold dead feed reader, but they are absolutely flooding me with feed items. I’ve been spending the last week or so trying to build a filtering system that would make the information flow a little more manageable. Finally this evening […]
QueryAnvil: AI As Search Sidekick Instead of Main Character
I was staring in frustration at the search results when I thought, “I wish I had some way of marking which of these results are useful and which aren’t, and then have an AI analyze the different sets for language use and give me suggestions for how I can revise my search to get more useful stuff and less crap.” Then I thought, “Oh damn, that sounds like a good idea, I should make that.” So I did.
Blaugust Blogging: MiniGladys Has Replaced 90% Of My Google “Quick Reference” Searches – No AI Required.
I have been writing about and using Google for decades, so I get it — it’s super-easy to use Google for quick one-off searches like finding official web sites, getting a name spelled correctly, getting a quick topic overview, etc. But with Google’s insistence on using water and electricity on AI to summarize the information […]
Using Google Books for Web Search: Concept Compassing
I’ve been spending my weekend playing with how Google Books could guide Web search after someone asked me about #3 in Five Ways Google Could Improve Search In 2025 That Have Nothing To Do With AI. How could Google Books make search better? I had some ideas and I applied JavaScript to them. After a few days of doodling around I’m at that point where I’ve got something that works so well I keep falling down rabbit holes playing with it. 😂
A Reddit Search Which Offers Paths, Not a List
Recently, I’ve been following a lot of Internet culture news stories and discovered that Reddit has a lot of useful information and backstory that I’ve missed. I decided to create my own Reddit search tool, Reddit Paths. Since I had access to full search results *and* I didn’t have to pay for them, I further decided to do a little experimenting and stunting.
Goofing Around With YouTube’s API (and Throwing In a Little AI)
I discovered the YouTube API this week and I’ve been using it to take out all my frustrations at YouTube’s terrible search offerings. I don’t know mobile, maybe it’s great on mobile, but YouTube’s search is balls on desktop. First I made a new channel search. Then, a video search. THEN, because I wanted a […]
Collab-O-Matic: Using AI To Create YouTuber Teamups
I’ve been thinking lately about using AI to aggregate and respond to current/contextual information as it seems to me that’s a better use of it than something as general as Web search. With Web search the AI requires a lot of contextual understanding and common sense which it doesn’t have, so you end up with […]
Web Search Where AI Is The Condiment And Not the Main Course
One of the reasons I’m not a big fan of AI search is that it doesn’t seem granular enough to me. That is to say, there’s not a lot of back-and-forth, patron interview type stuff so the AI is left to do a substantial amount of heavy lifting in the form of inferring all the […]