Recently James Corbett did an episode of Corbett Report on tools for online researchers. He listed some he uses and then his site members listed more in the comments.
Here I've compiled them all together with a brief explanation. You can now find this list on the links page in it's own "Tools" section. Suggestions for additions to the list are welcome, here in the comments, or sent to modmail anytime.
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youtube-dl - comprehensive program for downloading youtube videos - terminal or GUI - with many options
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Yandex Image Search - excellent image search & reverse image search too
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convertcase - convert the case of copy/pasted text
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highlighter - extension for an online highlighter
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HTtrack or webhttrack - download and preserve entire websites
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Web to PDF - online webpage to pdf convertor
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Million Short - Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason
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Archive web pages: https://archive.ph/ or https://archive.is
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https://ricks-apps.com/osx/sitesucker/ (like Htrack for OSX)
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nsfwyoutube.com - watch age-restriced videos on youtube without signing in. Just paste nsfw in front of youtube in addressbar of video
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Bypass Paywalls - extension for Chrome, Brave, Chromium - also available for Firefox
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Open Broadcaster Software - download in-progress live streamed videos
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ArchiveBox - powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline
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Wallabag - self hostable application for saving web pages: Save and classify articles. Read them later. Freely.
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Keepnote - note taking application that works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X
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WayBack Machine Downloader - Download archived webpages from wayback machine
Tor Browser https://www.torproject.org/download/
This lets you do your research privately.
tor is so risky its not even worth it for anything related to conspiracy theories
Please don't discredit our research by calling it what the US government wants people to believe they are.
As for Tor, what risks are you talking about?
EDIT: There has been a lot of government disinformation concerning Tor. Bear that in mind.
you need to have a good understanding of cybersecurity to be truly safe. so its not a good idea for most people.
Thanks for your input. What I see here is something of a perfect solution fallacy. What this does is keep a lot of your information private. More people absolutely should use it.
Tor is not less or more secure (unless you control exit nodes), but you can access data with Tor that you can't access on the public web.
That's why Tor can be useful: not for privacy, but wider access to obscure data.