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.

My money is on more of us doing this. As more of the internet gets generated instead of written, the tools worth having will be the ones with nothing to sell you.