AI Research Engine: 100+ Free APIs, 18 Source Clusters, Zero Google Required

I asked Claude to research whether anyone had built an MCP server for browser automation. It did three web searches, came back confident, said the space was "relatively sparse." I shipped a version. Two weeks later I found four existing tools — two with 500+ stars — that did the same thing. One was literally on the front page of HN the week before I started building. Claude wasn't lying. It checked what it could check. The problem is what "researching" actually means when the only tool is web search. So I spent a weekend auditing where research data actually lives. Academic papers with 250M+ entries. 140M+ patent filings. npm/PyPI/crates.io download trends. SEC company filings. FRED's 840K economic time series. Prediction markets. Podcast databases with 190M+ episodes. Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, 170 StackExchange sites. Nearly all of it is free, has a working API, and returns better signal than a Google search. And almost nobody queries more than 2-3 of these at once. That's the pro