The speaker switched from Google to Kagi, a paid search engine with no ads or tracking. Kagi lets you block sites, customize results with custom lenses, and see which results have paywalls. It charges a subscription instead of selling your data.
Replacing the big tech platforms, and today it's the big one, a better Google. Look, I think we all know that Google is terrible right now. It's all ads and promotions and crap that you didn't ask for. Here's a search for best headphones. Like, what the hell is all this bullshit? The AI is frequently wrong. You can't turn it off. Google tracks you sometimes even when you tell it not to. Instead, I've been using Kagi for more than a year and I recommend it. Here are 10 reasons why. First, no ads ever. The results at the top are there because they are the best results and the results are just better. Like, not even considering all the crap that Google jams in there. I get what I'm searching for more reliably on Kagi. There are no trackers at all. It does not keep a list of what you've searched for, unlike Google, which does keep a list and routinely hands that off to law enforcement or the government whenever they're asked to. You can block websites permanently. If you are sick of Pinterest showing up for everything, block it. You will never see it in the results again. You can also do the opposite, by the way. If you really trust a particular site like Wikipedia or the CBC, you can move those results up higher. You can turn off AI slop. You don't want to see AI images? Turn 'em off. Think a webpage is slop? Report it. AI summaries are there, but only if you ask for it by adding a question mark at the end of your search. No question mark, no AI. Now this one's really cool. They have these things called lenses that let you search within a defined pool of sources, like only academic journals or only fact-checking websites. And you can make your own lenses too, like only Canadian news outlets. It shows you right in the search results which websites use a lot of tracking so you can avoid them or just block them with one click. It'll show you if the content is paywalled before you click. And here's the best part: you can customize the results page any way you like. If you don't want to see images in the main results, you just turn them off. You don't want to see forum results? Off. Inline maps? Summary boxes? Listicles? Off, off, off. There is one problem with it. It's American. Look, I have searched high and low for a good Canadian search engine, but the ones I found do not return results good enough for me to recommend them. So if there are no ads, how does Kagi make money? With small subscriptions. You can try it for free, then the plans start at $5. And look, I don't like paying for things that others offer for free either, but when that free version is free because you are the product, then that's not really free, is it? Every search you do on Google is another brick in a wall they built around your data and sold it to the highest bidder. Kagi is at kagi.com.
Ten times Canada helped the U.S. with its wildfires, instead of whining about the smoke. 
