I recently discovered that NotebookLM added a Discover button. This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s really good! It completely changes how I use it now.

A recent YouTube video about NotebookLM caught my eye. I was just curious to see what others were doing with it, and that’s when I saw it: the Discover sources button. Up until then, if I wanted to start a notebook, I had to bring my own sources. That meant a lot of googling and poking around YouTube. It worked, but it was tedious.

So I tried it out. I told it to search for detailed information about walking beam ferry boats (don’t ask why, I go down rabbit holes!) I wanted to learn a bit about how the chief engineer used the starting lever to manually kickstart the steam engine in motion. I clicked the Discover button, and boom! It found a bunch of sources and let me pick which ones to include.

Being able to pick the sources is important because sometimes it finds stuff I’d already written on my blog, which I’ll admit is oddly satisfying, but not good when I’m trying to find new stuff.

I find the Discover button more effective than using Deep Research in ChatGPT. I can type a specific prompt, and NotebookLM hunts across the web and YouTube at once. No more juggling tabs.

I tested it on Sulanharas Creek too (that obscure creek renaming I’m mildly obsessed with). It didn’t find anything new, but it validated for me that I had found everything I could about it.

This is going to be my go-to research tool from now on. One button, one prompt, and I’m off and running.