David Johnson

Well things change.

Back in July I shared how after six months using Kagi search, I didn’t feel that the benefits over my previous search engine of choice, DuckDuckGo, were sufficient to justify carrying on paying for Kagi.

In the last couple of weeks I have reversed that decision and am now back using Kagi as my primary search engine.

Why the flip flopping?

DuckDuckGo, for all of its privacy features, felt to me as though more ads were creeping in to the search results. The appearance of the results felt messy to me compared with Kagi. I just want a clear, accessible list of results from my queries. Kagi feels as though it gives me that. For me user experience is almost as important, maybe it is as important as the results themselves?

Kagi also makes me want to explore its other search features, and I put that down to the user experience. It’s a joy to use, if a search engine cans be that.

I use Kagi’s Starter Plan which at $5 a month allows for 300 searches. The page that I linked to also explains how those searches are counted. I find that for my usage 300 searches is quite enough.

I’m pleased to be back on Kagi.

“I have never lost a bag,” I proudly and gratefully told my wife as we shuttled from one terminal to another while in transit at Heathrow Airport. We were on a bus, zigzagging around buildings and aircraft, occasionally disappearing underground. Nearing our destination we passed some open doors giving us a glimpse into the maze of conveyor belts which carry passengers’ luggage to and from the aircraft. I’m like a kid in a candy store at airports. It might not be the cool thing to say these days, but I have always been like that. I find it fascinating how these little, and sometimes not so little cities function.

We were on our way from Lisbon to Maui, and our next flight was the long haul across the Atlantic to Los Angeles. We had two nights in LA while my wife attended a doctor’s appointment, and from there on home. As we overnighting in LA, we planned to collect our luggage at the airport there instead of leaving for the next leg of the journey. My wife’s bags came out pretty quickly. For me, I watched the carousel slowly empty and people drift away into the night. In the end in was just the two of us. It was obvious that my track record on no lost bags had just come to an end.

We were both tired, it was four in the morning the next day where we had just come from, and gone nine at night where we were, but we couldn’t rest. Two helpful ladies who worked in the airport did some searching around, made some calls and then sent us onto the airline’s baggage department in the next terminal. We were there for half and hour, the upshot of it all was that they could not say where the bag was and that I had to go to my final destination, Maui, to make my claim and try and find it.

What to do next?

I felt as though I needed to stay on top of this. As far as I was concerned no one knew where my suitcase was, though it was looking as though it never left Lisbon.

We caught an Uber to our hotel and I ruminated over what to do. I find it interesting what causes me to loose my cool, and this was obviously one of those situations. I was less than happy and not the most communicative of people until I had stepped under the shower at the hotel and washed away the journey thus far and my frustration.

By the time that I got into bed I had decided to head back to Maui the next day and see if I could move along the search for my suitcase. My wife would follow in a couple of days after her appointment. At this stage I had little faith that I would see it again.

Back in Maui

By lunchtime the next day I was at baggage claim at Kahului airport. I picked up one of my wife’s bags that I brought back for her and headed to the airline’s luggage office. I had clocked its location as I walked into the baggage hall.

My experience there could not have been more different than the previous evening. It was not that the agent had not been helpful last night in LA, I think that it was a question of scale, and lack of sleep. The night before I was standing behind a desk trying to decide what to do while interacting with an official. Today I was standing next to the Maui agent, looking at his computer screen as he explained to me what he was looking at and for. Detective work was in process. I left with the assurance that essentially a world wide call had been put out for my bag. I also learnt of other bags from other travelers that had gone missing.

That AirTag

The next morning I was feeling less uneasy about my suitcase, but was not completely comfortable about the situation….and then something made me take a look at the Find My app on my phone. I have used Apple’s AirTags while traveling, dropping them into suitcases and bags that I take with me, since Apple introduced them. I always have one attached to my keyring. However, I rarely have had a need to use them, meaning that I have never lost a bag as I quoted at the beginning of this essay. Occasionally I’d take a look to see where a bag is while I was traveling, especially when the AirTags were new to me. It was a novelty back then. Now I barely give them a second thought. On top of that, if I had mislaid my keys they were never far away. Certainly not the other side of the world. I don’t think that I computed that these little disks could be tracked down the other side of the world.

So for some reason I opened the Find My app and there my suitcase was, sitting at Lisbon airport where we had flown out of two days previously.

Once my wife was home, I drove back to the airport to speak with the agent again. I showed him what the AirTag had revealed and he said that he was about to contact me. The airline had found the suitcase and had worked out a flight plan to get it to Maui. It would be here in two days. I was over the moon.

Journey and Return

I had taken a note of the flight plan and over the next two days, courtesy of the AirTag, I followed my suitcase as it journeyed across the world back to Maui. Yesterday lunchtime I received a text from the agent with a photo of the my suitcase at Kahului airport. A couple of hours later they had delivered it to my front door.

For all that it was upsetting, disruptive and disconcerting to find that my suitcase never left our port of origin, I was impressed how quickly and smoothly the airline found it and got it back to me.

The AirTag was the icing on the cake, assuring me where it was at any given moment, apart from when it was in the air, and allowing me to track it from half way round the world to my home.