Digital Gardening

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ThreadQuilt

A search engine that only searches widely used discussion boards. No AI junk content (we hope!)

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Stract

An open search engine with some interesting features, transparency about its alogorithms, and no tracking.

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Inoreader

Best RSS reader (freemium is great) imo. See also Feedly - but they've gone off the boil for me.

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Globe Explorer

Globe Explorer is a search engine (that uses AI, but in an interesting manner)... When you do a search for a topic, it returns the results in a categorised form, as if you were going to learn that topic.

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Zettlr

Zettlr is personal notebook, in which you use the Markdown format to create and link your notes together into a "Digital Garden" or Personal Knowledgebase. There are lots of tools like this (NotionAI, Obsidian, AnyType etc) but Zettlr has nice features, is free, and open.

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AskPandii

A search engine that uses AI but can do interesting things with your results, such as "create me a timeline about xxx" or "give me alternatives to xxx" . Requires (Google) login.

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Epitome

A semantic search engine for ancient text.

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Ooh directory

A directory like the olden days of Yahoo. The new blogs category is

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A Million Short

A search engine that removed the first million results - or what Google would give you - and instead rummages around in the "less popular corners" or the internet. Free for 100 searches.

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Wiby

A search engine that prefers and returns older sites.

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Diigo

My favourite bookmarking, or tagging, app. Others include Pocket, Pinterest, Pinboard etc. With these, using any account (both your Chrome personal account, and York account) you can save a bookmarks, and even on your mobile device too. AND you can annotate PDF etc. I have used the free version for over 10 years.