The start of the university year looms once more, and for some that means the start of the sprint toward the final dissertation hand-in in January 2019. Want to amaze your tutor with your ‘mad scientist’-level search skills? Here are a few ‘power-up items’ that I recently noted over at my JURN blog, and which don’t require you to sign up to some online Cloud service.

* WorldBrain for Chrome. Locally copies the text of all the Web pages you visit, and makes the resulting cache searchable by keyword. Bookmarks and blogs are fine as a basic ‘outboard brain’, but if you need global domination this seems useful.

* Open Semantic Desktop Search. Genuinely free desktop search for Windows, enabling Google-like search across and inside your bulging folder of saved research texts and PDFs. It can also auto-OCR inside PDFs that don’t have OCR text, a new feature added in a December 2017 update. Worth trying as an open source alternative to the increasingly nagging and intrusive Copernic Desktop Search.

* My own JURN search-engine. Speedy keyword-search across all public ‘open access’ arts and humanities journals, plus the full-text from selected university repositories. Groups tests show it regularly outperforms all other such services, even Google Scholar, for finding free public articles.