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 […]
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.
Adding Topic Pages To My Local News Aggregator
I’ve been spending the day adding topic pages to my local news aggregator — these are pages where articles are filtered for keywords clustered around a certain topic. This is plain keyword filtering, so you will get the occasional mechanically-produced goofy result, but I’ve found them useful and mostly on-topic. You can browse the topic […]
Building a Local News Aggregator With 1000+ Sources
Last week I went poking around and found a local news sources dataset from the Media and Democracy Project. I used that as a quarry and mined it for RSS feeds with a couple of Google Apps Scripts. I’m not finished with that dataset but so far I’ve come up with 1008 verified RSS feeds for local news sources in America.
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.
Gift Article Gazette Upgraded
A couple years ago I created a site called MastoGizmos, a collection of tools for exploring and searching Mastodon. One of the tools in the eleven item collection is Gift Article Gazette, an aggregator that collects articles tagged GiftArticle and GiftLink from around Mastodon and makes them available in one place. The first version of […]
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.
Turning Wikipedia Into a Word Game: Wiki Stack Game
Wiki Stack Game starts you off with a big handful of random words. Your objective is to add words to a Wikipedia search with the goal of making the query as long as possible while still getting results. #Wikipedia #games #WordGames