Matt Fusfield

If we take sponsorships, ads, and other junk out, what would a modern search engine look like? What features could be developed if users are the customers, and not the sponsors? A startup called Kagi is working on this with features to make searching fun and quick again such as:

• the ability to focus your search on different types of websites - for example, to search forums or discussion boards, or on sites by independent creators rather than large media firms

• adjust the search to favor certain sites or completely block others

• automatically compiling all of those “listicle” sites that show “Top 10 whatever ” into a short, easily bypassed list

The whole thing is designed to make searching fast - find what you need and quickly move on.

Here’s the tricky part though. Building and running all that is expensive. Rather than sponsorships, Kagi makes money the old fashioned way: they charge for use of their service. There are a few plans; they start at $5/month. If Kagi wants to keep making money, they need to make their service really good for their end users - and it is hard to compete with the “free” service from Google. But this means their needs and ours as users - a good, fast, private search engine - are aligned.

Neat little app for sharing travel plans and such with “IRL” friends. I like the distinction here between social media and social networking

ev.medium.com/making-so…

I have wondered why Apple hasn’t done this yet, given how long it has taken individual states to sign on to using digital IDs. Adding your passport to get through TSA and other ID checks can be done once and works for everyone.

www.theverge.com/2024/12/6…

The cool ElevenReader app now has a feature to upload a PDF or submit a URL, and it will generate a podcast episode about it. I think Google NotebookLLM was the first to do this, but nice to have the feature in a standalone app.

I recently discovered Listen Later. It is similar to a read-it-later app like Instapaper or Goodlinks, but in this case, it uses text-to-speech to read the articles to you. You email it an article or a URL and it shows up in a private podcast feed so you can listen to the article later. I spend a lot of time in the car and this is a great way to catch up on reading!

Back in the days of the PalmPilot, there were a few makers of little keyboards that folded up for easy use while traveling. This cool keyboard from ProtoArc is a modern equivalent and even has a trackpad. It supports 3 different Bluetooth devices and works great with my iPad mini and the Apple Vision Pro!

Lot of cool AI apps out these days, but I’m enjoying Cleft Notes. The idea is you ramble on about whatever, it records you, transcribes the text, and then organizes it into well-written notes.

I’ve never really used any custom launchers on the Mac, but recently tried out Raycast and am hooked. I left cmd-space to use Spotlight, so option-space opens Raycast. It is super quick to open an app just by starting to type its name, but the really fun part is when you start to add extensions…they have everything from adding reminders to querying ChatGPT all from one text box. Pretty handy.