Do you want to learn from and reference some of the world’s best minds and writing on a subject you’re working on? I’ve found this practice super powerful throughout my career. I’ve compiled a set of tools that make it easy for anyone to do this and I visit this page several times each day. I’d like to share these tools with you.
The following are links to Google Custom Search Engines indexing tens or hundreds of thousands of pages inside 10 top websites bound together by a common topic. I treat them like my personal reference books on these topics, where the pages inside the book are the archival content of subject matter expert websites published over many years. (Right: a search inside my climate change CSE for heat pumps, for example, returns thousands of articles from 10 specific expert organizations)
Links below, on each page you can click on the words “enhanced by Google” to search, then scroll below the ads. Not sure what to search for? Try searching things like the name of your city, or sharing in the Knowledge Management CSE, AI or sustainability in the analyst firms one, or carbon budget in the climate change one. By default the results are sorted by relevance but they can be sorted by date. Works great on mobile too!
Climate change (See also Shift.tools)
Futurists (see also this list of 120 women futurists you can search the archives of)
Change Agents Worldwide & Friends
STEEP
Economics
Environmental
From other people:
A great tech history search engine, Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter now searchable. I searched for “RSS” here and was delighted.
Jerry’s Brain is a delightful longterm mind map by Jerry Michalski, which I’d sure love to make a habit of searching more often.
Works in progress
Product Management Influencer Twitter List Search
I began using CSEs extensively when I was a journalist. Any time I found a list of great blogs or websites about a particular topic, I’d make that list into a CSE and save a link to it. Then, when I’d write an article or prepare to be a guest on a podcast, or have any other research need, I could quickly zero in on what deep subject matter experts said about a particular topic. When you do that, you can come up with some really great information – and people just assume you read it when it was originally published and you remembered it when you sat down to write! Not necessary with this simple but powerful tool. Check it out at https://cse.google.com/ and make your own. You can do it in as little as a few minutes and it can bring an incredible depth of knowledge from other peoples’ work to your own.
When I bought the house I live in, it included this delightful set of Encyclopedias from 1970. Several of these custom search engines contain 2-4X as many pages as this set and they are regularly updated. You can imagine the political differences, too.