A few months ago I’ve tried to up to Kagi, a subscription-based search engine, that I heard a lot of good stuff of. Since I was in a country where their payment system didn’t work yet, I couldn’t actually complete the signup. They’ve generously given a Starter plan me for free while their system was being sorted out (nice, thank you!), however that plan comes with a “300 search per month” limit — which I’ve quickly seen to really matter.

It was around a time when I had a new laptop, and been trying to get things right installing ArchLinux, where both the processes and the hardware changed a lot since I’ve last had done it in… 2011-ish. So that involved many queries to the Internet. So much so, that my 300 searches were done on the 3rd day or so.

So 3 days into a month I already used up my quota, and couldn’t just upgrade to unlimited (yet), since it was a gift from the Kagi. So what could I do different in the future for a better experience?

Habit Changes

What does that better experience really mean? Doing a retrospective of how was I searching, it seemed to me a really mindless, throwaway process:

plopping in keywords, scrolling quickly around, not really clicking on any link necessarily, but changing the word and re-running the search (total shotgun approach)
running the same query again and again across days
relying on the search engine to get slowly changing or unchanging information

… and more. I feel like these are the habits from other search engines, where I didn’t find things, when most pages are “sponsored”, when I didn’t put in effort to check the queries I run just sent them off, and could do because it was “all you can eat”, and that made me not really pay attention to the “taste & flavour” of the results…

Bookmark more & better

One of the most obvious idea I had was that since I go to the same pages all the time, why not save those links in bookmarks?

I used to bookmark a lot, and organise those bookmarks, etc… Then I gave it all up, because … I could just search things? And because organisation wasn’t that simple either. Which folder does this link go to? Is it under Programming > Languages > Python? Or under Professional Development? Or under Useful Libraries?…

The same perfectionist “it doesn’t just need to be bookmarked, it has to be filed away correctly too!” was really not doing me any good service… It took a little while to work through this, and just settle on putting every bookmark in a flat hierarchy, and use tagging to help me find them (rather than folders). Difference being, that a single link can have multiple tags, but can exist in only one folder. I do believe that’s the only scalable way, ever since I was trying to do the other way around (and failing)¹.

So bookmark:

the (book) library catalogues that I borrow books from
the forums and docs pages of projects I’m using²
the useful tools available online, from timezone wrangling to currency conversion…
blogs, publications, web comics that I frequent…

and so on… Now whenever I visit a page, I do stop for a moment and think: could I imagine myself wanting to come back here in the future? If yes, let’s bookmark.

It’s not all perfect, but it’s more about the tools than the process: Firefox on Android doesn’t seem to handle the same “search in bookmarks” shortcuts, or make it more difficult to do. Oh, well, eventually…

Add custom search engines

Sometimes I the page I want to go to is within a large collection, such as a wiki, or a forum. I know it’s there, but unsure where exactly. Bookmarks take me to the page, but then I have to use the search as a second step. This can be made a lot more ergonomic in pretty much every current browser by adding custom search engines³.

Adding Wikipedia’s search? It might already be there. Adding ArchLinux Wiki? It takes 15 seconds to do, and I have a shortcut to so much Linux system admin knowledge that is riddiculous. Whatever site has a search, can be added just as simple.

Here the kicker is to remember that shortcut (and the fact that I’ve added that shortcut), but after that, it’s off to the races.

Change how I search

While I was auditing what sort of searches I like to do, one type that stood out was when I was asking for something like “what’s the website of this-or-that company or project or organisation?” More often than not, these are companies, projects, and organisations that are notable enough to be in Wikipedia. Here’s the new process: search Wikipedia or the company/project/organisation and use the link from their page.

This also feel more to the point than search for “<companyname> website” which is just “close enough” in meaning, and will still get me many results, even if the answers should be a single value.

This is caveated by that for programming / open source projects, the better search is probably GitHub / GitLab / CodeBerg, where they are likely hosted (in decreasing probability, currently), and switch to search engine search when that fails.

This is aling the lines that if I already know an authoritive source for the information, I should probably go there directly?

Misc

Bookmarks & custom searches brought down my search count already. One that is more of a housekeeping change is that my browser was reopening pages from my previous session whenever I started it. If I had any Kagi search results open, that just used up another in the quota, and there often there were more than one open… Setting my browser to start afresh on each time I open it helped with that — and also helped with me not being distracted every time I open my browser by whatever I was doing last time, as opposed to what I wanted to do now.

What did I Learn?

Now that I’m on a proper paid plan, I will up it to the Professional plan, where searches are not metered. It doesn’t feel like just a lazy release valve⁴, rather because I don’t believe this sorts of limit to my access information is productive. “Limited” limitations, when there’s a purpose, can indeed be “cretive limitations”.

If I believe that Kagi does a good job, then there’s no point sticking to the quota; if I don’t, then why am I using it in the first place, instead of any of the alternatives?

And if I want to use the power of creative limitations, I can always do my own quest with rules like no search, it’s within my power.

I do feel that the changes to my thinking due to this experience — being more deliberate of what am I looking for and thoughful about where might I find them; choosing and rewarding sources I find useful and reliable; using the little gray cells more — I want to keep and even cultivate. These changes also brought back a more old-school internet vibes (old as in when I bought printed magazines that came with collected links of what you can find on the World Wide Web, something more tangible and purposeful). I guess I’m getting old as well. :)

Tagging also got a big push from and also due to a push from the book Everything is Miscellanious. It’s also why e.g. Gmail was awesome to have tags while other clients were still just doing folders. Fastmail goes even further, lets you choose labels (tags) or folders, which is pretty awesome of them. ↩︎
Almost every good project has a good forum/docs, or maybe a good forum/docs contributes to the project being good? Here’s looking at you ArchWiki, Obsidian Help,… ↩︎
For example in Firefox. ↩︎
As in “if I’m unlimited, I don’t have to care about all the effort I’ve described so far, I can go back to my old habits”. ↩︎