General topic searching on Google is a pain, especially if you don’t know much about the topic you’re trying to explore.

When your knowledge is minimal it’s hard to refine your query to get past the very general “front door” results that Google tends to provide for a topic search. Enter Smushy Search.

Smushy Search takes your topical search term and uses the Datamuse API to find related words (a frequency setting allows you to specify how common the words should be).
Four of the found words are then picked at random, added to your query term in two “or” pairs, smushed into a Google query, and opened in a new tab. The idea is to let you explore a topic with in-depth search results without needing any kind of prior knowledge, and without the time needed to build a specialized vocabulary.

Want to learn more about how Smushy Search works? Check out this ResearchBuzz article!

Query (one term, please):

Now that your Datamuse request is set up, do you want to add a couple more words to tilt the search? Put them here, separated by comma (optional)

Do you want to filter out some common ecommerce URL and string patterns?
This will remove Amazon and eBay, and attempt to remove common ecommerce results.
YesNo

Do you want to restrict your search results to .edu and .gov domains?
Does what it says on the tin. Might break your search, but worth a try.
NoYes

What is the maximum frequency you want in your additional query words?
The lower the frequency, the less the word is commonly used. Low-frequency words generate the most-focused results but there are fewer of them to find.

Smush Up A Search Query

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