Useful Research Tools

I lift the veil on a few tools I rely on when researching various topics.

Perplexity

There has been a recent surge in interest in large language models (LLMs) within search, with both Microsoft and Google announcing half-baked solutions, powered by OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s own LaMDA, respectively. All in all, I prefer Perplexity.

Perplexity is an answer generator powered by a search engine rather than a search engine that happens to provide instant answers too. Think of it as Google’s featured snippets but with multiple references you can easily check up on. It also offers follow-up questions. It is not perfect, but the quality of responses is generally decent and easy to verify.

If only Perplexity had the computing and graphing capabilities of Wolfram Alpha built in too…

Connected Papers

There are plenty of decent search engines for research papers: Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, CORE, or Internet Archive Scholar. Connected Papers offers a different experience, though. It visualizes prior and derivative works of a single article in a graph. With Connected Papers you can easily go back and forth in the citation graph to discover relevant but overlooked literature.

Inciteful

Inciteful also relies on citation networks, but it connects literature and generates a graph or pictures the most relevant articles based on a few ‘seed’ papers. A really helpful feature is that you can run SQL queries directly on the result sets Inciteful returns, so you can filter and aggregate the data.

Shortform

Shortform offers high-quality summaries of many non-fiction books. At $197 per year, Shortform is not exactly cheap. However, I have gone through more than 200 books within only six months after signing up. It has increased my knowledge and productivity significantly. In my opinion, Shortform is definitely worth it.

Unlike many of Shortform’s competitors, the quality of the summaries is exceptional. In fact, most book summaries come with plenty of additional information not found in the books themselves, so Shortform places each text in a larger context and offers contrasting ideas.

I have connected Shortform to Readwise, which collects all highlights and transfers these to Logseq, where I keep all my notes.

Kagi

Kagi is a search engine that is highly customizable and does not show any ads or sell your data to third parties. I have set up custom bangs for most of the tools mentioned here.

So, if I am interested in, say, the size of the smart home market, I enter !pp smart home market size in the search bar of my browser, and Kagi hands off the query to Perplexity, which returns the results. To make that work, the URL for the custom bang is simply, https://www.perplexity.ai/?q=%s, where the query is encoded and inserted in place of %s. No need to switch search engines or click on a bookmark. Just type.