Digital Gardening
Stract
An open search engine with some interesting features, transparency about its alogorithms, and no tracking.
ThreadQuilt
A search engine that only searches widely used discussion boards. No AI junk content (we hope!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Inoreader
Best RSS reader (freemium is great) imo. See also Feedly - but they've gone off the boil for me.
