Hi Friend,
I’ve mentioned a few times in the MacSparky Labs that I pay for web search. That always raises eyebrows. So I thought I’d explain.
Even Google now injects AI slop before giving you search results, and there’s a good argument that search is going the way of the dodo. I use AI often, and yet I still find use for search.
When researching, I often don’t want an AI synthesis (or I just don’t want to burn unnecessary and expensive tokens). Search is very much a tool I still want on my belt.
Another argument is that search isn’t useful anymore. That one’s true. Type a question into Google and count how far you scroll before you hit something a human wrote to be useful rather than to rank. Ads, then a shopping carousel, then four pages of SEO sludge, then maybe a real result. It got worse slowly enough that most people stopped noticing. Advertisers pay the bills, and as a result most search is garbage.
So I pay Kagi for search. With Kagi, nobody can buy their way onto my results page because there’s nowhere to buy. The company sells subscriptions and that’s the whole plan. No ads, no tracker network, just search results.
The pricing is simple. Five dollars a month gets you 300 searches. Ten gets you unlimited, which is what I’m on. Twenty-five adds the premium AI models if you want them. The trial gives you 100 free searches, which is plenty to know. If you’d like to hear the full backstory, we interviewed the Kagi CEO on Mac Power Users last year.
What you get is a results page that’s just results. You also have control over the way it ranks for you. You can raise a domain or lower it. I’ve blocked a handful of content farms that used to clog technical searches. I’ve pinned a few sites I trust. It feels like my own bespoke search now.
It isn’t perfect. Local results are the weak spot, so about once a week I type !g in front of a query and Kagi hands it off to Google. (They call those Bangs.) I mostly use it to find out whether a restaurant is open.
I’ve spent money on plenty of dumb things in my life. I’ve got a drawer full of cables for hardware I no longer own.
Kagi is not one of those mistakes. It’s ten dollars for a tool I touch many times a day. And every time it does the job without trying to sell me a mattress.
As more of the internet gets generated instead of written, the tools worth having will be the ones with nothing to sell you.
Your pal,
David
Read this post on macsparky.com
This Week in the MacSparky-Verse
Here's what ran on the free side of MacSparky this week.
- On Intentional AI 6, Chris Bailey and I get into my email odyssey. I spent months trying to hand email over to a robot, and the system that finally stuck is a lot less glamorous than the one I started with.
- Google's Fitbit Air now syncs two ways with Apple Health, which makes it a real option if you want fitness tracking without an Apple Watch. It's $100 once with no subscription, and the price you pay is sending all that data to Google.
- On Focused 262, Mike and I try to build a personal philosophy for when AI writing help makes you sharper and when it just makes you soft. In Deep Focus, Mike walks through hiring his first full-time virtual assistant.
- Apple warned on its earnings call that it is bracing for supply pressure. I checked the store and a stock 13-inch MacBook Air is now two weeks out.
- Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. wrote about data privacy and border crossings, and I had thoughts. It still shocks me that an agent can ask for your phone and your password on a whim.
- On Mac Power Users 861, Stephen and I share the state of our task manager stacks. Stephen took it further and built his own Kanban app, Kan Do, and he tells the story of why he put it on the App Store.
This Week in the MacSparky Labs
In the MacSparky Labs, we covered a lot:
- The August meetup recording shipped, with the room going straight at the iPhone event and nobody ready to buy the folding phone except maybe me.
- I made a video on bill splitting and custom passes in the iOS 27 Wallet app.
- I made a video on Paperman, a little app that lays a soft paper texture over your entire screen.
- I published The Lab Report podcast on the mostly-Siri iOS 27 beta 5, and Friday Night Baseball coming to Apple Immersive Video.
That was a single week, and the Labs run like this every week. If that sounds like your kind of place, come join us.
DEVONthink Just Got Smarter
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by DEVONthink, the research and document manager I’ve relied on for years, and lately for a different reason than usual.
DEVONthink 4.3 shipped with its own MCP server. If you’ve been following what I write about robot assistants, you know MCP is the connector standard that lets something like Claude reach into an app and actually do the work instead of you exporting files and building your own bridge. DEVONthink closed that gap. The server exposes close to 60 commands, so an assistant can search, read, and organize inside your databases directly. It’s also an alternative to DEVONthink’s built-in AI features, which works with whatever assistant you’ve already got configured, and it opens the door to folding DEVONthink into more complex workflows.
What sold me is how carefully they built it. Privacy sits at the center of the design. You control local and remote access. Sensitive information gets redacted before it ever leaves your Mac. Databases you’ve already marked as excluded from AI stay excluded, and the server can’t reach around DEVONthink into the raw filesystem. A lot of MCP integrations shipped this year without thinking any of that through. DEVONthink did.
If you keep your research and files in DEVONthink and you’ve been curious about turning an AI assistant loose on them, this is the update that makes it worth trying.
My thanks to DEVONthink for supporting MacSparky.