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posted ago by catsfive ago by catsfive +174 / -0

GAW: RE-SEARCH β€” search the ENTIRE GAW archive (130,000+ posts & comments) right from your browser. No login. No tracking. No spying bullshit. And it's free.

Hey everyone. We all know that since the very beginning, GAW search has sucked donkey balls! Ever since AI came out, I started diving in and trying to learn it, and decided I wanted to put it to use building something real for the community β€” to solve the most glaring capability we've only ever barely had since day one: SEARCH.

GAW: RE-SEARCH is a local, "developer mode only" Chrome extension (works in Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera β€” any Chromium-based browser) that you can pin to your toolbar and use to keyword-search the entire GreatAwakening.WIN archive β€” over 130,000+ posts and comments and constantly growing β€” in just a few seconds. It's all made possible by something I built called FIREHOSE, which dumps every new post, every old post, every comment, into a searchable database. No login. No leaving the site. No tabs. No copy-pasting. You type, it digs in and FINDS that post you half-remember from two years ago. It lets you pull every comment a specific user left. It's super powerful, too β€” it lets you filter by score, date, flair, comment count. Find every time a phrase was mentioned across the whole board. This is the tool I wanted and couldn't find, so I spent the past two months learning AI and getting it built the right way.

πŸ”Ž Wait β€” is this Chrome extension spying on us?

HELL NO. For the technical among us (or if your tin-foil hat is on too tight), I have red-teamed the hell out of this, done code reviews on Gemini, GPT, and Claude MAX, as well as GLM 5.2 β€” all the biggest and most powerful coding AIs. The extension is unencrypted and can be fed by any of you into any AI you choose to have a look, as well. No surveillance, no spying, no bullshit. There's no paranoid cyber-Karen embedded in the extension because that's not where the guardrails belong. There's no reason to spy on legitimate users doing legitimate searches using legitimate methods by harvesting their usernames off the page DOM or whatever. That's surveillance code, full-stop.

Instead, it's the database that does all the heavy security lifting. Full disclosure: this is a Cloudflare Workers D1 database. Cloudflare knows their shit (and we all know from seeing the occasional "Cloudflare block message" that they're the ones protecting Scored.co's infrastructure). Instead of policing our users with bullshit, we're watching the crown jewels β€” the database β€” to protect it from malicious entry, mass-data harvesting, and the real attacks and exploits. The normal searches? That's the extension, which:

  • Has zero content scripts. It does not read a single pixel of any webpage you visit. It can't. It doesn't have the permission.
  • Asks for exactly one permission: storage β€” and that's just so it remembers your saved searches when you close and reopen it. That's it. One permission. Go look at it in the manifest and examine this for yourself.
  • Talks to exactly one server: our search proxy. The only thing that ever leaves your machine is your search query itself, so the archive can return results. Nothing else. Ever.
  • Has no login, no accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no advertising, no telemetry, no SDKs from Google/Meta/anyone. No AI either β€” the search runs on a powerful structured query language (boolean operators, field filters), not a black-box model. Go read the source β€” it ships as plain, readable JavaScript. "Load unpacked" means you can literally open the files and audit every line. Nothing is compiled, minified, or hidden.

Bonus for the diggers: removed and deleted posts are indexed too, and flagged with a REMOVED badge β€” so you can actually see what got memory-holed instead of pretending it never existed.

The actual abuse-detection β€” the stuff that stops a script-kiddie from hammering the database or probing for architecture mistakes β€” lives at the server layer, where it sees every request (extension users and direct API callers alike) and flags and blocks technical abuses and generally bad behavior or malformed requests. It does not need surveillance of us users making legitimate search requests, because those requests follow the rules, follow the right paths. Injection-shaped queries, harvest patterns, sustained rate abuse β€” those get caught and blocked at the wall. Your normal "q drops about water" search isn't traffic, it's the whole point. Search freely.

TL;DR: the extension is a search box. The armor is around the database. You are not the threat.


πŸ“₯ How to install (2 minutes, no technical skill needed)

This extension isn't on the Chrome Web Store β€” it's a manual install straight from GitHub. That's a deliberate choice: the Web Store is a walled garden that demands accounts, review queues, and gives Google a kill-switch on your tools. GitHub keeps it in our hands. The trade-off is one extra click. Here's all you do:

  1. Download the ZIP from the Releases page. Click the newest gaw-research-search-v2.5.0.zip under Assets.
  2. Unzip it somewhere you'll remember β€” Desktop, Documents, wherever. (Right-click β†’ Extract All on Windows, double-click on Mac.)
  3. Open Chrome and type chrome://extensions into the address bar.
  4. Flip on Developer mode (the toggle, top-right).
  5. Click Load unpacked (top-left), then pick the folder you just unzipped.
  6. Done. The βš– icon appears in your toolbar. Click it and start digging.

(Works the same way in Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi β€” any Chromium browser. Firefox isn't supported β€” sorry.)

How updates work. Chrome won't auto-update "Load unpacked" extensions β€” that's a Chrome rule we can't change. So instead, the extension checks GitHub for you. Every few days when you open it, it quietly looks for a new version. If one's out, a green banner pops up at the top with a Download button right there β€” no hunting, no guessing. Grab it, swap your folder, hit ↻ Reload on the GAW: RE-SEARCH card in chrome://extensions, done. You can also click Check for Updates in the footer anytime to force a check. The version number next to it tells you exactly what you're running.


πŸ”„ How to update later (when the green banner appears)

The banner does the hard part β€” it tells you a new version exists and hands you the link. From there, three quick steps:

  1. Download the ZIP from the Releases page. Click the newest gaw-research-search-vX.X.X.zip at the very top under Assets.
  2. Unzip it and overwrite your old folder (or use a new one β€” doesn't matter).
  3. Go to chrome://extensions, find GAW: RE-SEARCH, and hit the ↻ Reload button (the little circular arrow on its card).

That's it. Your saved searches carry over. The version number in the footer confirms you're on the new one β€” and the banner disappears on its own once you're current.

(Don't see a Reload button? You may have removed the old folder. Just click "Load unpacked" again and point it at the new one. Saved searches reset only if you fully Remove + reload β€” a plain Reload keeps everything.)


πŸ’‘ Tips on how to use it

  • Start simple. Just type and hit Enter. That's the whole learning curve.
  • Filters card (collapsed by default) β€” narrow by date (24h / 7 days / 30 days / custom range), author, score, flair, comment count, and sort order. Huge for research.
  • Advanced Mode (flip the switch up top) β€” power search: exact phrase, any of these words (OR), and exclude these words (NOT). There's a live preview that shows you the actual query it's building as you type. If you've used Google's advanced search, you already know how it works.
  • β˜… Star any search to save it. Your recent searches show up as one-tap chips.
  • Copy results β€” grabs your current on-screen results as a tidy markdown list you can paste anywhere.
  • βŠ• Add a Post β€” can't find a post? Paste its GreatAwakening.WIN link and it gets indexed on the spot.
  • Copy debug info (tiny link at the bottom) β€” if something acts weird, click that before you report it and paste it in your comment. It's timings and status codes only, no secrets, no personal data.

🐞 OUR OFFICIAL COMPLAINTS HOTLINE: 1-800-I❀️CATS5

For a slightly faster response with less meow, just drop a comment in this thread β€” bugs, weird behavior, search that should've found something but didn't, feature ideas, praise, abuse. I'm reading all of it. The dumber the question, the more welcome it is.

LASTLY: I've probably spent about $500 in subscriptions, API credits, and database throughput to bring this to you frogs. If anyone wants to donate, it'll be used to keep the database humming:

ETH: 0x7D3489f52405A5D60d187760f12f19FE916494d8

LET'S. FVCKING. GOOOOO!!! 🫑