[HN Gopher] Kagi Small Web
___________________________________________________________________
Kagi Small Web
Author : trueduke
Score : 665 points
Date : 2026-03-17 09:53 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kagi.com)
| emehex wrote:
| StumbleUpon?
| timvdalen wrote:
| I miss StumbleUpon so much!
| rdmuser wrote:
| Personally my favorite spiritual successor to stumbleupon has
| been cloudhiker.net. I found kagis to be too personal blog
| focused for my tastes. I love that kagi is doing so much of
| this out in the open though.
|
| There are a surprising amount out there:
| https://blog.woblick.dev/en/2025/best-stumbleupon-alternativ...
| Kovah wrote:
| Hi, creator of Cloudhiker here. Thanks for mentioning my
| site! Let me know if you have any questions, issues or ideas.
| pu_pe wrote:
| First thing I thought... honestly we should bring it back
| anyway
| kilroy123 wrote:
| There are still a lot of alternatives:
|
| http://cloudhiker.net
|
| https://www.offscopes.com
|
| Newsletter version if you prefer: https://randomdailyurls.com
| modernerd wrote:
| Great idea. Index is based on submitted sites:
|
| https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.tx...
|
| There is also Small Comic:
|
| https://kagi.com/smallweb/?comic
|
| https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallcomic....
|
| And Small YouTube:
|
| https://kagi.com/smallweb/?yt
|
| https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallyt.txt
| postalcoder wrote:
| And Small HN:
|
| https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714 (Ask HN: Share
| your personal website, 2414 comments)
| erremerre wrote:
| I like the idea, but would like to be able to select a language
| and see the small web of that language. There are more languages
| than English, and this tool could make them thrive.
|
| Also somehow if they are clever, they could use this for those
| translation system they are using, but please let us select our
| own language without feeding automatic translation like youtube
| does).
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I think the problem is that it's hard to curate feeds in a
| language you don't understand. I've been building an uncurated
| index of OPML blogrolls, with no language restriction. The OPML
| blogrolls are curated by their owners, so someone decided they
| met some inclusion criteria, but the overall list is uncurated.
|
| https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/
| drstewart wrote:
| Some context would be helpful
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Here is a link to the folks at Kagi talking about this
|
| https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| When I first clicked through, I got an inane essay about how
| people you love are like Bitcoin. At least I knew it wasn't
| written by an LLM due to the misspellings and simple errors in
| thought, but I wondered why that article was on the front page
| of HN.
| sam_goody wrote:
| So, basically, a random site from their index of ~30,000 sites.
|
| You can choose similar sites by index.
|
| But what are the criterion to have your site listed here, or how
| it will prevent this from just becoming a massive gamified
| advertising index, or anything more about "why these?" is not
| obvious to me.
|
| Can anyone explain what is special about these sites
| specifically, or where this project is going?
| dwedge wrote:
| The criteria are here:
| https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb#small-web
| apples_oranges wrote:
| A bit off topic, but I noticed I hardly ever use search anymore.
| It's just google.com/ai in 99% of cases. I believe in the future,
| search engines must go in this direction ..
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Kagi wants to exist in a world that doesn't need it anymore
| freetonik wrote:
| We can create worlds, not just inhabit ones created by
| corporations.
| criley2 wrote:
| Kagi is a for-profit corporation.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| You remind me of this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678#46709862
| freetonik wrote:
| On a similar note, I maintain and grow a manually curated
| collection of personal blogs with valid RSS feeds:
| https://minifeed.net/blogs
|
| The criteria is simple: human-written (as much as I can validate
| myself), in English (for now), with valid RSS feed, and not a
| micro-blog (so, more than just feed of links or short tweet-like
| messages).
|
| Similar to Kagi's Small Web viewer, or StumbleUpon-style viewer:
| you can get a random listing of blogs [1] or a random listing of
| posts from all blogs [2]. Feeds and posts are indexed, so full-
| text search works across all blogs. When possible and permitted
| by robots.txt, text is scraped for searching, so even if some
| text is omitted in the RSS feed by the author, search should
| work.
|
| Though I do plan to implement a similar "view one random post at
| source" kind of view, soon.
|
| UPD: Feel free to submit a blog, including your own! [3]
|
| [1] https://minifeed.net/blogs/by/random
|
| [2] https://minifeed.net/global/random
|
| [3] https://minifeed.net/suggest
| Kye wrote:
| The implicit criteria (tech/business and adjacent) is an issue
| with all these lists for me. But it's also a _personal_ list,
| which is great. I just wish literally anyone in these had a
| personal interest on anything else reflected in their lists
| because I keep checking them and being disappointed.
|
| A topic that's come up before on here with others doing the
| complaining about a list _I_ liked for this reason but wasn 't
| top-loaded with tech:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015676
| Cider9986 wrote:
| https://wiby.me/ is interesting. I am not sure if it updates,
| or if it just has old websites.
| zby wrote:
| I wish someone curated a list of sites that are llm written -
| but are not spam. Just to compare :)
| jwelten wrote:
| Interesting, really like the idea. Maybe in the future a
| possibility to use it in multiple languages
| unbindableisaac wrote:
| Bit bummed. The first random page I landed on was a really
| interesting article for me. The custom cursor (well why not) had
| me struggling to following a link, and instinctively I refreshed
| the page. I ended up somewhere else in the haystack with
| ostensibly no way back to that particular article.
|
| Perhaps I'm yelling into the void here, but what would be great
| is when first landing at kagi.com/smallweb, the url query
| parameter would be somehow set, as it is when "Next Post" is
| clicked.
| bjord wrote:
| doesn't solve the root problem, but maybe try searching for the
| topic in kagi with the small web lens?
| unbindableisaac wrote:
| I think it would, so long as the redirected URL with the
| search parameter was diarized into browser history. It would
| however introduce a behavior change that may be undesired
| (users need to know to press "Next Post" instead of
| refreshing).
|
| In any case, my Kagi search for the article containing the
| memorable phrase "rare as rocking-horse s*t" came up empty.
| Perhaps it's not yet been indexed.
| arscan wrote:
| I do love the concept, but a little part of me died each time I
| came across an article with a very strong AI voice. That just
| feels antithetical to the 'small web' ethos because it obscures
| the 'neighbor' behind it.
| windowliker wrote:
| Welcome to 2026 when the next door neighbour is an AI
| datacentre using up all your groundwater.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Related recent blog post "Small Web Just Got Bigger"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366230 13-march-2026
|
| Previous post 7-sept-2023
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37420281 185 comments. And
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39476015 23-feb-2023 36
| comments
| yashasolutions wrote:
| StumbleUpon is that you?
|
| Jokes aside, it's really nice and I can totally see becoming
| addictive. Kudos to Kagi team for an other user oriented product.
| (as a side note, I am using Kagi daily and i didn't know about
| this tool)
| coopreme wrote:
| SU was amazing. Stumbling upon Ze Frank? It was internet gold!
| dethos wrote:
| Yes, SU was fascinating at the time. I kind of like this style
| of exploring the web; it gets a bit addictive, you spend hours
| on it but end up finding interesting content and other stuff
| that you wouldn't otherwise.
| beAbU wrote:
| Man, I wasted _days_ on SU. It was incredibly addictive in a
| way that did not feel unhealthy.
| chneu wrote:
| Im surprised nobody has mentioned cloudhiker which is made to
| be like stumbleupon.
| ArtificeAccount wrote:
| I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not
| impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts
| saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been
| my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what
| you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related
| websites.
|
| I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website,
| type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were
| looking for. That was back in like 2010. To me that's the old,
| and useful, search engine that I want.
| Terretta wrote:
| In comparisons (often shared here) among SERPs, kagi has tended
| to have fewer blatant results campers crowding out original
| authoritative sources.
|
| And yes, Google's founders were right that web ads would kill
| that experience you want.
| windowliker wrote:
| Funny to look back and recall how useful web search actually
| was at one point. Ahh the good old days.
| ArtificeAccount wrote:
| The enshittification of everything has really put a damper on
| the technological optimism that seemed to be the norm back
| then.
| windowliker wrote:
| We had the tech we were always promised and then it got
| taken away, for... reasons.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| What you describe sounds more like a large ElasticSearch like
| full-text index over the entire internet.
| ArtificeAccount wrote:
| Whatever it was called, it was way better than whatever
| Google is doing currently.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| In fairness, there wasn't the level of utter crap back then
| that there is now. Not that there wasn't a LOT back then,
| but there is even more now.
| ArtificeAccount wrote:
| People say that, but on the other hand companies like
| Google have a lot of much better ways of categorizing
| things now than they did in the past. I'm not sure I buy
| the excuse of "gosh, it's just too hard for us :(" from
| this international company worth trillions employing
| geniuses.
|
| It really feels either intentional or egregiously
| incompetent.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| We literally have internal emails[1] showing that Google
| simply gives no shit about the quality of its search
| engine's results.
|
| [1]: [The Man Who Killed Google
| Search](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-
| google/)
| sodapopcan wrote:
| That's fair.
| 112233 wrote:
| How comes yandex.com can show me results that contain my
| search term? Most egregious example: I am searching for
| name of abandoned blogspot domain: yandex shows me 1
| result, which is that domain. Goolge shows me "no
| results" fishing monster. Blogspot is google service !!!
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| I switched about a year ago. At the time it did seem like a
| step up from Google results. But there's been an increasing
| prevalence of low quality results. Blogspam, AI websites, etc.
| Obviously not blaming Kagi here, web search has gotten hard
| recently.
|
| Is Kagi still better than Google? Probably, I don't really know
| because I don't use Google anymore. But at this point I feel
| like I'm with them out of inertia more than being an avid
| supporter. One of these days I'll re-evaluate Google and decide
| whether to switch back or not.
|
| It does occasionally surface interesting results from small
| sites that you wouldn't get on Google. I do find that to be
| useful.
|
| Kagi definitely isn't a _bad_ search engine by any means.
| Honestly if you haven 't used it, try the 100 search free trial
| on one device. Maybe you'll like it. This feels more like a
| general decline of the open web.
| ArtificeAccount wrote:
| I feel the same way. I'm probably going to end my
| subscription at some point, but right now the effort involved
| is what's keeping me with Kagi.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Is usage based pricing available?
|
| I'm thinking of trying it out Kagi, but adding another
| monthly commitment is what's holding me back.
|
| A single credit top-up and occasional usage until the
| credits run out sounds good to me.
| Tepix wrote:
| Edit: Kagi has a starter plan with 100 free searches:
| https://kagi.com/pricing
|
| Also, from the Kagi privacy pass FAQ at
| https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#faq:
| *Do you plan to allow purchasing privacy pass tokens
| without having an account?* Yes, this makes
| sense. This is possible because technically the extension
| does not care if you have an account or not. It just
| needs to be 'loaded' with valid tokens. And you can
| imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously
| purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an
| account at Kagi. Let us know *here* (
| https://kagifeedback.org/d/6163-kagi-privacy-pass ) if
| you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize
| it.
|
| Personally I don't like being signed in during searches,
| this seems like a good solution.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| "the effort involved"
|
| Feels like your comment saying it was too much effort to
| cancel Kagi took more effort than cancelling Kagi.
| vvilliamperez wrote:
| Actually their payment model has some baked in niceness.
|
| If you don't use the service in a month, they just refund
| you. This has kept me from unsubscribing for years now.
| Some months I use it, some I don't.
|
| It's more of hassle to unsub, and re-sub again when I
| want.
| ArtificeAccount wrote:
| I think you're right, haha
| sheepscreek wrote:
| It's definitely not Kagi's fault. The AI slop is simply
| taking effect and I feel sorry for them. I never expected
| them to match Google's quality, but I was impressed with how
| close it was when I used it a few years ago.
| postalcoder wrote:
| Kagi used to use Google's search API. They discuss the
| current state of their index here:
| https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
| mpalmer wrote:
| Everyone has to answer for themselves why they would be OK
| with Google hoovering up their data in order to deliver
| substandard results, vs Kagi actively working to remove low-
| quality results all while collecting no personal data.
| jmye wrote:
| Yes. I use both (Google only at work) and Kagi is certainly
| no worse and comes with the massive benefit of simply not
| being Google. It's worth paying for for that reason alone,
| even if the engineers at Google are constantly working on
| making sure I'm tracked anyway.
| emacdona wrote:
| I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment voted so
| near the top. I've had the same experience. In my experience,
| Kagi used to be great... then it became good... and now it's
| "better than Google".
|
| "Better than Google" and the fact that I can choose websites
| to exclude from my search results are two features that I
| remain willing to pay for, however.
| mattmcal wrote:
| DuckDuckGo allows you to blacklist websites for free
| Groxx wrote:
| Only up to five of them, which is almost completely
| useless.
| searls wrote:
| I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the
| grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the
| same experience.
|
| I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the
| ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure
| a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches
| --respecting my site rankings/lists
| fourside wrote:
| I'm confused by this comment. The original comments talk
| about Kagi not living up to the hype. You say you've had
| the same experience and wish you could get LLMs to use
| Kagi for web searches?
| tensor wrote:
| Especially odd as that's exactly what Kagi assistant
| already does. Maybe they'd just rather use their key than
| pay Kagi for LLM based search.
|
| On that note, Kagi research is legit amazing. There have
| been times I've spent 30min searching for something
| without success. As a last resort I asked Kagi research
| and it found why I could not. More than one option even.
| Now intend to use almost more than normal search.
| tensor wrote:
| I'm extremely confused by these comments. Are we all using
| the same google? Just to make sure I wasn't crazy I just
| did a search on Google and 1/2 the page was a combination
| of google AI result and ads. Below that there were 2.5
| links visible. One reddit result, and two blogspam.
|
| The exact same search on Kagi ('best lllm for coding') nets
| reddit, hacker news, and some other forum results right at
| the top, followed by a long dense list of links to various
| sites (including some of the same blogspam of course), but
| over all the results are hugely more rich and varied and
| also not at all the same.
|
| How can you possibly say that a site that gives you 50% ads
| and a bunch of low quality links is remotely "only a little
| better" than a site that gives you zero ads and a huge
| number of better quality links?
| ewoodrich wrote:
| I just block all those results on Google for free with
| uBlock Origin and uBlacklist.
| stebalien wrote:
| I've been using it for 2.5 years at this point, and have the
| same experience. I don't think it's hopeless, but Kagi will
| need to step up their methods. IMO, there's actually a lot
| they can do here.
| user3939382 wrote:
| For over two years I've maintained the practice of using Kagi
| and falling back to Google if I couldn't find something. I can
| count the number of successes doing that on one hand. In the
| meantime I get to support a company which actually respects me
| as a user and isn't doing things like tying accounts to
| browsers, AMP (trying to take over the web), trying to kill
| adblock, etc.
| zknill wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for ~18months and your description doesn't
| match my experience at all.
|
| Querying for something like "snowflake json from variant?" in
| both engines and in google I get a sort-of-right-but-not-
| really-that-helpful ai summary about "parse_json" function. In
| Kagi I get an actually useful summary with code examples of
| parse_json, but also the colon-based syntax for accessing
| values inside nested objects without needing to parse anything.
|
| I very rarely need to go into a page, I use Kagi quick search
| summary with the "?" suffix and it almost always gives me a
| useful answer in one-shot.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| But then you're not using kagi search just the LLM
| mpalmer wrote:
| No, the responses are backed by searches.
| dotancohen wrote:
| So some guy does hard work developing some technique or
| solving some problem. He documents his experience, puts
| up a tutorial on DO or AWS or somewhere else, and the ads
| on that document help offset the cost of hosting. Now
| comes along Kagi, scrapes that data, and presents it to
| you, their paying customer.
|
| I see a problem with this.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Do you pay LLM providers for agentic features? From your
| past submissions, you certainly seem to. Do those
| features make web searches and curl the results?
|
| Were the models underlying those features trained on
| _all_ available web content, or are they unlike any other
| enterprise models out there?
|
| At any rate, you should see a bigger problem in what
| Google does, which you don't seem to.
| tensor wrote:
| One way or another the ad driven model has to go. It's
| toxic for society.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| That doesn't make it the same as search results
| 0xdeafbeef wrote:
| Try g.ai. It's stupid fast and uses google indexes. Kagi?
| sometimes doesn't correctly parse intent, in Google thing you
| can just ask function doing this and gives you it, with
| examples, grounding and extremely fast. I'm paying for kagi
| since the begging and I guess id cancel it because it gives
| not so much added value
| raincole wrote:
| First of all, the parent comment's point is that Kagi is
| often be praised for being like so-called-old-Google[0]. So
| it's only reasonable to assume they only care about the
| links, not the LLM summary. What you described is even
| further from old Google.
|
| Second, if you want this kind of LLM-digested search result,
| Google AI studio blows everything out of water (including
| Google search, obviously).
|
| [0] I've never bought into the idea that old Google was so
| much better. But it seems to be a very popular opinion on HN.
| ymmv.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I feel like I can still do this with Google if I use quotes.
|
| Kagi I've been using and it's fine. Better than DDG for sure.
| But sometimes I still go back to google to find something kagi
| is struggling with.
| spicycode wrote:
| I've switched as of a few years back and it definitely works
| like pre-AI/search index degradation for me. But I def
| understand search is very user specific based on how you search
| and what you are targeting.
| muyuu wrote:
| this is hard to evaluate, but we cannot replicate the old web
| search experience not just of Google, but Altavista, Lycos or
| Yahoo, when most of the web is siloed and increasingly botted -
| simply because the stuff you see in the siloed internet is
| actively "protected" out of your control
|
| perhaps the best we can do is this "small web" thing which can
| be seen as some sort of retrofuturistic solution, but of course
| the siloed internet is a black hole of content and effort, and
| of course if the small web gets enough traction, astroturfed
| generative AI content will target it
| DuzAwe wrote:
| I've been using kagi for about eight months now as well and at
| least in Europe it's a significantly better search engine than
| Google by a long shot. The results are significantly more
| accurate. I don't get listicles I don't get AI spam. I get what
| I'm searching for, it's refreshing.
|
| The assistant is a nice addition but it's search is superior
| for me.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| I typed in my dentist's full business name and location,
| "<name> family dentistry <city> <state>", and it was still #5
| in the results. I still, out of habit, tapped the first link
| and called that number instead. It's ludicrous. In 2010 that
| would have been the top hit, next to the Wikipedia page on
| dentistry.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| Off topic, but ref
|
| "I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a
| website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article
| you were looking for"
|
| It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser
| (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no
| brainer to index what the user have actually seen... (Could
| even be restricted based on viewport - I don't think it's that
| crazy of an idea)
|
| I know there's a a number of third party programs which does
| though. Of course - multi-device being the norm - complicates
| things.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| That's called search: in history.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| That doesn't search the _content_ of the pages you 've
| browsed, though, right?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Right, I misunderstood the case.
|
| I guess because it isn't then trivial for a web browser
| to do, indexing every text ever rendered?
| packetlost wrote:
| I think you would need to take it a step further and do
| full-text search on loaded pages. It's certainly possible
| but probably pretty data intensive.
| flexagoon wrote:
| There are things like Mymind (SaaS) or Karakeep (selfhosted)
| that do this, though they require you to explicitly save the
| pages instead of indexing everything by default
| evanjrowley wrote:
| I would really like to see integration between Karakeep and
| SearXNG so that I could combine online search engine
| results with my self-hosted bookmarks serice.
| twiclo wrote:
| I haven't used this but looks someone created a self hosted
| version of Microsoft's Recall
|
| https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall
| evanjrowley wrote:
| >It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser
| (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a
| no brainer to index what the user have actually seen...
|
| The answer to this is complicated.
|
| Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement
| this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser
| history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet
| captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor, but
| not for the user.
|
| The choice to not implement this for the user is very
| deliberate. It's contrary to the vendor's interests if the
| browser provides this capability directly to users. If a
| user's browser can take you to a website directly, then you
| are not using the vendor's search engine, meaning you are not
| looking at their ads, paid search results, algorithm, etc. It
| would severly impact their business model.
|
| This is also the reason why browsers have:
|
| - Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate
| address bar and search bar.
|
| - Implement only basic hierarchical organization for browser
| Favorites.
|
| Directly and indirectly, Google is the central nexus of all
| modern browsers. Aside from Google Chrome, they also:
|
| - Fund the vast majority of Firefox.
|
| - Pay Apple for preferential treatment.
|
| - Provide the same mechanisms to vendors who base their
| browsers on Chromium (i.e., Microsoft Edge, Brave).
|
| I would love for this to not be the case. There is hope to be
| found in small independent browser and search
| companies/projects.
| nubg wrote:
| > both will upload your browser history to the cloud
|
| I wonder if the EU could fine them a couple weeks of
| revenue for this. Seems illegal.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| I'm 80%+ sure the claim is BS
| evanjrowley wrote:
| It's not BS for the people who don't understand the dark
| patters that guide users to enabling all of this stuff.
| That's everyone with a Windows PC who didn't bypass the
| Microsoft account requirement and went with all of the
| defaults in Microsoft Edge. Everyone using Chrome
| Enterprise/Education whose Google Workspace admins don't
| want to get into trouble for not backing up people's
| stuff (i.e., sharing it all with Google). Same goes for
| company Windows PCs set up with Microsoft Entra ID. It's
| everyone with an Android device and a Google account who
| wants their settings backed up or transfers to a new
| Android device. It's in the fine print and legalese for
| all of these products and services.
| skycrafter0 wrote:
| > Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate
| address bar and search bar.
|
| On the other hand, the additional tools in the Omnibar
| (calculator is the example most should be familiar with)
| makes the bar incredibly useful for random daily tasks.
| Also, it seems that there is an "omnibox" API that
| extensions can use, which allows them to add their own
| tools to the omnibar/omnibox. Would be interesting as a
| form of "assistant" in a way.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| > Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement
| this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser
| history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet
| captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor,
| but not for the user.
|
| Citation needed... (I'm talking about the page *content*,
| not the metadata like url and title)
| windowliker wrote:
| >Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement
| this. [...] both will upload your browser history to the
| cloud.
|
| I'm fairly certain I've caught Firefox doing something
| similar (regularly sending multiple tens of MB to Google
| servers in the background.)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| So fwiw, browsing history shouldn't be anywhere near that
| big making it unlikely there what it was. It compresses
| well, if they were to do it I'm sure they'd do it at
| regular intervals instead of a years' worth at a time,
| etc.
|
| And, of course, Firefox is open source and this wouldn't
| be kept a secret.
| windowliker wrote:
| In which case I'd love to know what it was doing sending
| that much data to Google IPs when I don't use Google
| services...
|
| I've read all the Mozilla help pages about what automatic
| connections Firefox makes and it wasn't accounted for
| there (unless possibly something to do with
| SafeBrowsing.)
| everlier wrote:
| Never thought about this, but it makes sense they don't
| want a better local search, just for users to rely more on
| their product. It's messed up - so much time and human
| potential wasted on poor search and ads.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| Thank you! I was wondering why bookmarks are treated so
| poorly by browser, as if they are forced to include them
| but hate them with a passion. That explains it. I'm a bit
| of a bookmark hoarder to the point where I have a local
| html file that holds and displays all my bookmarks and I've
| got that page set as my default.
| vel0city wrote:
| If only some operating system incorporated a way to make
| everything you've seen on your computer locally searchable,
| wouldn't that be a neat feature?
| olejorgenb wrote:
| I believe there some projects trying this now using OCR
| IIRC.
|
| Did even Microsoft try something like this? It's of course
| something you'd only want running locally
| gjm11 wrote:
| I think the joke is that Microsoft _did_ do something
| very like this -- they call it Windows Recall -- and it
| got a _lot_ of angry pushback. (Partly, IIRC, because the
| specific way they did it initially was very bad in terms
| of security and privacy, but I think a lot of people
| quite understandably don 't trust them to implement it
| (a) the way they claim they do or (b) competently, so
| even after they made a bunch of changes aimed at making
| it less scary it's still viewed with a lot of hostility.)
| olejorgenb wrote:
| Ah :wooosh:, :D
| mock-possum wrote:
| > no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... I
| know there's a a number of third party programs which does
| though
|
| Which company would you trust with this kind of deep
| surveillance information on you though?
| olejorgenb wrote:
| I would trust Firefox if they made a version which did the
| indexing locally. I think I'd trust chrome as well as long
| as it was implemented locally.
| paradox460 wrote:
| There's an old Mac app that tried to do it. History hound. It
| sometimes worked
| BrunoBernardino wrote:
| I won't add links so it doesn't look like I'm spamming or
| promoting a service (though I am, but it seems in line with
| what you're talking about), but there's a product I've built
| with my wife which has made things a little bit better in our
| experience because it gives you an option to choose different
| providers/indexes, thus tailor results to your personal
| preference. You can find it from my personal website (my
| username . com).
| alpineman wrote:
| Disagree, I love it, at least as good as Google
| LatticeAnimal wrote:
| I think that's the problem. I used to find it far superior to
| google. Now, there are a lot of queries where I am
| unimpressed with the results and end up trying google just to
| get better results. (like I used to do with DDG)
|
| I've had a few experiences now where someone is standing over
| my shoulder asking me to look something up, and I search
| kagi, find nothing, then search google and find what they
| asked me to look up. Then when they ask "what was that other
| search engine you used first?" I don't feel compelled to
| vouch for kagi :(.
| threetonesun wrote:
| throw a question mark on the end to invoke the AI summary
| results and I find you can get the thing you're looking for as
| a reference right away. I've used this to dig up forum posts
| that are over a decade old multiple times with success. Asking
| the Kagi Assistant for a list of possible links works pretty
| well too.
|
| Also on Kagi if you see bad results, you can flag the website
| to ignore it.
| graton wrote:
| I've been using it for over 2 years now. I'm quite happy with
| it. I like that I don't see adds and my searches aren't being
| used to target ads against me.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I think it's completely unreasonable to assume that anyone
| would beat Google at the search game, by outgoogling them.
|
| The reason, that Google is not like it was back in the day is
| that they are fighting a massive, antagonistic industry
| designed to game Google. The reason that chatGPT et al improves
| on search is that there's a effective but very expensive
| compute layer on top, not that they are better at the Google
| game. (This extra layer works out fine, because our time is
| more valuable and Google always came at an insane discount,
| also thanks to ads)
| hadlock wrote:
| The good news is that Google search results have degraded so
| much that competitors like Kagi can compete directly. I moved
| off Google search completely on all devices ~1 year ago and I
| don't miss it at all, most of the time I forget I have a kagi
| subscription.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I've been on Kagi for over a year and I'm pretty happy with it.
| At the beginning there were some noticeable differences in
| results that frustrated me, but at this point I don't really
| miss Google except for some of the nice "not web site results"
| features like calculation and conversion. I mostly go straight
| to Wolfram Alpha for those now. And for a lot of the "random
| curiosity satisfaction" stuff where I would have preferred
| Google results, I'll now just use ChatGPT or Gemini.
| prophesi wrote:
| It's hard to judge one's personal experience with
| "personalized" search engines. I have personalized search
| turned off for Google so Kagi is a much better experience for
| me. I'd recommend leaning more into their feature to
| lower/block sites from your results, which with Google would
| require an extension for a similar but degraded experience.
| flakeoil wrote:
| > I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a
| website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article
| you were looking for.
|
| Is that even possible today considering there is so much more
| information and pages around today than in 2010? Old google
| worked with old Internet. The old Internet does not exist.
| Vexs wrote:
| The only thing that seems to have gotten a lot worse is the
| trend of ai articles- which isn't kagi's fault but it would be
| nice if they could figure out how to filter them. They all
| follow the same patter- "specific thing you want" with a table
| of contents with loads of repeated chapters and unrelated
| information, spattered with effectively random images.
| dawnerd wrote:
| They're starting to with their stopslop. Sites that are
| mostly ai content get flagged and deranked. Still not perfect
| and I think they only just started working on the backlog of
| reports so hopefully it holds up helping.
| malikNF wrote:
| I really loved Kagi and was a paid customer for close to two
| years. But sadly this year I wont be renewing my plan.
|
| Kagi made search feel just "right" it was simple, got the job
| done and had some really simple but cool search features.
|
| But over time they started doing way too much, and I kept
| seeing more and more features that I really didn't want. It
| felt like I was paying for all this while I just wanted to type
| something on to a text box and click search and see a bunch of
| results organized according to my filters.
|
| I wish they would just dump all the other nonsense projects
| like ai and just focus on search only. Or give me an option to
| pay for search only without any limits.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I do agree actually but I'm sticking with them. Their mission
| of ending slop but also pushing ai tools seem at odds. On one
| hand they're marketing to the anti ai crowd while also
| joining the ai hype? It's weird.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| As I'm not familiar with how Kagi is "pushing ai tools"
| this is mostly a comment on the framing of your question.
|
| Are you really saying that a company specializing in search
| - natural language oriented at its core - should not make
| use of the biggest technological revolution for processing
| natural language?
| dawnerd wrote:
| No, I meant their push of their assistant, summarizer,
| and news product (which is ai generated summaries).
| chneu wrote:
| I found kagi lacking and very limited unless i paid. Even with
| a paid sub it didnt feel like good value.
|
| Im using qwant now and i feel its better.
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| I have had a great experience. I can find what I'm looking for
| and I can block or down-rank sites that are constantly shite. I
| did find that Google over the past few years has sucked but my
| Google results were always miles better than most peoples until
| a couple years ago.
|
| It's interesting to hear that you can't find what you wanted
| easily on Kagi.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yep that was my experience to. It wasn't bad necessarily, but
| certainly not as reliable / dependable as google, and not worth
| paying for.
|
| Could just be that I'm familiar enough with google to always be
| able to make it work for me, could be a frog in boiling water
| type situation, but... as much as Kagi gets talked up on HN, I
| was pretty disappointed when I tried it. I was ready to get
| blown away, and instead I was underwhelmed.
| ashivkum wrote:
| it probably doesn't help that they're constantly bifurcating
| their tiny team into new projects. their browser is essentially
| nonfunctional for daily use but they've already moved on to
| porting it to Linux
| dimgl wrote:
| Agreed, I have not been impressed with Kagi at all.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I have the complete opposite experience and it works wonders
| for me.
| w10-1 wrote:
| For needle-in-the-haystack searches, I find longer quotes works
| really well (in Kagi or google)
|
| Kagi value proposition for me is not the $5 search but the $10
| search plus whatever AI chat model you want (I originally did
| ultimate when I used it for coding). Controllable search and
| chat satisfies all my one-shot needs.
|
| I can't really blame Kagi for the web getting bad or for the
| weak market for secondary search. Part of me wonders if they
| could use the AI search tools now on the market (now getting
| lots of investment) instead of the human indexes (subject to
| monopoly control).
| atmosx wrote:
| Is that possible today? I have no data but I assume the scale
| of "the web" grew a couple of orders of magnitude compared to
| 2012.
| Falimonda wrote:
| Why have you used it for months now if you're not impressed?
| ArtificeAccount wrote:
| Because I'm too lazy to unsubscribe. It's cheap so it's not
| high on my list of things to do, lol.
| gwerbin wrote:
| I am _very_ impressed. Kagi manages to maintain Google-par
| quality or better most of the time, whereas DDG became an
| unusable slop pit a few years ago. I 'm a very happy customer
| and happy to keep paying for both Kagi and Orion, in part on
| principle and in part because the product actually works very
| well for me.
|
| I don't even use the AI assistant much, only when there are a
| lot of disjointed search results and I want a quick summary.
| jorvi wrote:
| Kagi uses Google (and other) indexes.
|
| The main usecase for Kagi is the fact that you can personally
| uprank/downrank/pin/block sites. And it has a bunch of creature
| comforts built in like:
|
| - Attempting to detect AI slop, concatenating listicles ("10
| best ...") under one search result heade
|
| - Attempting to block translated Reddit results
|
| - Custom lenses that search only coding resources or recipes or
| whatnot
|
| - Redirects (so x.com > xcancel.com), although I feel this
| should be a browser feature
|
| - Better translate than Google
|
| There's probably a few things I'm forgetting.
|
| Kagi is abysmal at image search though. Just assume you will
| have to use Google for that.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That's totally fair, though I personally don't share your
| experience. It could be that we just use search for slightly
| different reasons.
|
| One of the reasons I love Kagi is that it respects double-
| quotes for exact matches. This might seem trivial except I
| remember being frustrated with both Google and DDG years ago
| for throwing irrelevant results at me even when I'm querying
| for an exact match. When Kagi was in beta and I got invited as
| an early adopter, my feedback to them was that I want a search
| engine that won't throw crap at me when I'm looking for an
| exact string match. They've honored that feedback! Even though
| Kagi doesn't necessarily have the most results, I want double-
| quotes and things like intitle to actually work as expected.
|
| Another awesome thing about Kagi is how it lets you prioritize
| certain domain names. Likewise, it's great for blocking domains
| completely. All of this has made my search results _very
| clean_.
|
| To each their own. I'm not saying you're wrong, but to me
| there's no comparison between Kagi's results and every
| alternative I've tried.
|
| Oh, another thing I like about Kagi is that it's less censored
| than Google, Bing, and DDG these days. I used to be a fan of
| DDG until I noticed that results were sparse or nonexistent for
| anything even remotely controversial I queried. It became too
| PG-rated.
| Computer0 wrote:
| I am quite happy with my Kagi search results. The biggest
| weakness I have noticed in my few months using it is that it is
| a terrible experience for shopping. I believe this is due to
| similar factors that make it feel like a less spammy ad-ridden
| experience overall. It works well enough for product research,
| but comparing across product vendor's product pages tends to
| suck. I have to use a specific lens to shop for Raspberry Pi or
| Microcontrollers for example.
| input_sh wrote:
| Could've at least checked if the website even allows embedding
| before embedding it, I found two by randomly clicking around that
| don't.
| codethief wrote:
| Yeah, many links in the embedded blog posts don't work either,
| presumably because the target website doesn't allow embedding.
| On mobile I always have to open them in a new tab for them to
| work.
| chneu wrote:
| Some browsers actually block embedded pages. Lots of mozilla
| based browsers will.
| input_sh wrote:
| No, it's the website owners setting a specific header
| (X-Frame-Options to SAMEORIGIN), as it prevents someone
| else from embedding your website and phishing for user
| credentials.
|
| No browser prevents that by default, but this tip is found
| in pretty much every "best practices" hosting tutorial, so
| it's very common to stumble upon that browser error in the
| wild.
| azangru wrote:
| The first random page it returned to me was this --
| https://gaultier.github.io/blog/how_to_make_your_own_static_...
| -- which was about building one's own static site generator,
| which I really liked. I did not realise when I closed that page
| how hard it would be to find it again, because, of course every
| new visit to Kagi returns a different page :-)
| dark-star wrote:
| yeah, same happened to me, the first site I was sent to was a
| list of people sending in random "sunday thoughts" (or whatever
| it was called) on (actual physical) postcards which then got
| scanned and posted. There were some good things in there. Now I
| can't find that site again because I didn't realize it was
| randomized...
| 7777777phil wrote:
| I run a Hugo blog and I get more interesting referral traffic
| from Kagi's small web index than from Google at this point. 5,000
| curated sites is small enough to be useful most "indie web"
| directories are graveyards unfortunately..
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Too many AI or relegion related sites.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Tried it myself, first three I got were also about AI.
|
| Curious if there are any statistics on which topics people are
| writing about.
| titzer wrote:
| How do we keep getting surprised by enshittification!?
|
| The worst case scenario is that AI runs everything, we have no
| skills, and are completely dependent on it...and it shows us
| crummy commercials and subtly steers us to paid placement with no
| recourse whatsoever. I hate this possible future, but this is
| where the money will lead.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| As Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council,
| said today:
|
| > "It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about what
| we'd have to do about that, but that's really the last of our
| concerns right now."
| rusakov-field wrote:
| My blog was getting traffic from that domain! So that is what
| that is.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Same. I got an influx of bots from Singapore (around 50 visits
| per day) and in figuring out what's up with traffic, I noticed
| kagi as a reference for the first time.
|
| Weird times. People are training their LLMs on my content yet
| people are still interested in technical content written by a
| human being. So I guess you just keep writing, right? I find it
| disheartening to know I'm training LLMs but I think I'm more
| encouraged knowing there are still humans reading it.
| rusakov-field wrote:
| My attitude with writing has been : "Write to the void".
| There is nothing else to do.
| lelanthran wrote:
| This is fantastic - how long do I have to press F5 before my blog
| shows up?
|
| :-)
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Can we just agree that the internet is broken and no amount of
| boutique search solutions will save it? Kagi, DDG, Google they
| are all trying to do a search in a pile of steaming sh*, in a
| hope of finding that shining diamond.
|
| Quite possible that people will come up with a solution
| eventually. Like Samizdat was a solution to censorship and a
| broken publishing system in USSR.
| Aachen wrote:
| Does it work for you guys to go to about and then click on the
| "list" link?
|
| For me it says I'm blocked due to hitting a "secondary" rate
| limit (don't understand what that means). I don't think I've
| opened a page on github yet today so clearly it's a lie. Is it
| the referer that triggers this?
|
| In general, freeloading the "small web" on a Microsoft service is
| kind of ironic. Being blocked by algorithms that try to detect if
| you're really human is precisely one of the things one would hope
| to get away from by using small, personal websites
| skydhash wrote:
| If you're not signed into GitHub, it always throws those errors
| page (maybe due to scrapping being done with residential IP
| addresses).
| Aachen wrote:
| Cool, so much for the small web
|
| No scrapers running on my IP address btw, at least not since
| it was assigned to me ~10 hours ago (I'm in one of those
| countries where ISPs seem to have agreed amongst each other
| that IP addresses must change daily so you can't reliably
| host things)
| lich_king wrote:
| I think it shows the limits of hand curation. It's a tiny, human-
| reviewed slice of the "small web", only allowing a subset of
| blogs... but if you select the "programming" category and click
| around for a short while, you get a fair amount of obvious AI
| slop.
|
| I don't think it's Kagi's fault, but I guess it's depressing in a
| way. A lot of "small web" bloggers dream of being a part of the
| "big web", and when they get a cheat button, they have no second
| thoughts about mashing it.
| hamdingers wrote:
| I'm a Kagi search/assistant user and advocate but the "small web"
| product is a frustrating misnomer.
|
| To me the small web is any little website that was created to be
| interesting rather than to sell me something. That includes stuff
| like neocities, "shrine" type sites, single purpose sites, fandom
| portals, web experiments, etc.
|
| Unfortunately Kagi's definition of "small web" is: blog or
| webcomic. You must have an RSS feed and it must have recent
| posts. That rules out so much interesting stuff I don't
| understand the point.
| idop wrote:
| Not only that, I just clicked "Next Post" more than a hundred
| times, and over 90% of posts I got were about LLMs and coding
| agents.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| This is a fairly recent phenomenon: I'm a longtime Small Web
| user and even I struggle with this massive influx of AI
| posts. I'm hopeful it will be addressed.
| jeffalyanak wrote:
| I could definitely see value in filters for "has RSS" and "has
| recent posts"--maybe even as the default view--but I absolutely
| agree that this is much less interesting to me without the
| wider world of interesting, small sites.
| wiether wrote:
| Same feeling here
|
| Heavy Kagi user and the idea behind small web was appealing;
| but how its implemented don't click with me
|
| Their rules excludes an absolute gem like
| https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ which is, to me, the essence of
| what we could call the "small web".
|
| Each times the topic pops up, I try a few random ones and never
| found anything interesting.
| j1elo wrote:
| Well, thanks. That small web just taught me in a very concise
| way a thing or two about bicicle braking technique!
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| This website is the small web - self contained. It's a really
| good example of the Internet we had and apparently some still
| want. I think of it like computer graphics where you're
| definition of space can get bigger as you add a bunch of
| resources each with their own model space into the relative
| context of world space. The small web should define how we do
| that and discover things, not what or how we build within
| each specific model space.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Expert/auteur websites like Sheldon Brown's (or, one of my
| favorites, Ask Aaron https://runamok.tech/AskAaron/FAQ.html)
| are the pinnacle of what's possible with the small web. Today
| this kind of info ends up in an ad-ridden hosted wiki or
| locked away in an unsearchable discord.
|
| There's also novelties like
| https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/, this
| probably hasn't been updated in a decade but that makes it no
| less interesting.
|
| Then there's exceptionally cool demos like
| https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/. This sort of thing
| just doesn't fit in a "blog" format unless you're writing a
| blog about how you built it and linking out to it.
|
| If anyone knows of a directory of sites like these
| (preferably with a shuffle option) I'd love to hear about it
| (and contribute)!
| tty456 wrote:
| Sheldon Brown's content is great, but is it ironic that the
| first thing you see on his site is a Google banner ad?
|
| Understandably, he'd like to earn money on his content and
| I see no problem with that. But for me to visit his site
| and have Google add yet another tracking event to their
| "interest pile" about me (I guess i'm in the market for
| bikes now?) is a bit off putting.
|
| He can't be making more than a few bucks a month through
| that single ad, right?
| hamdingers wrote:
| I truly had no idea, I guess I've always had an ad
| blocker.
|
| He's been dead since 2008, so I assume the banner ad
| keeps the lights on in the absence of his income and
| input.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| He died about ten years ago.
| abletonlive wrote:
| > are the pinnacle of what's possible with the small web
|
| if this is the pinnacle then I want nothing to do with it.
| zby wrote:
| I am looking for something that would filter for sites that
| rarely post but have good content. The number one problem with
| most of these systems is that everything favours frequent
| posting. Even if I do it manually, I cannot keep the tabs over
| many rarely posting sites - this is an obvious example of a
| problem that we delegate to computers. Favouring frequent
| posters creates incentives to do that even if quality worsens.
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| The perverse thing here is that's exactly the opposite of how
| we've traditionally valued resources!
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd be fascinated on the economics of this from Google's
| perspective: specifically the unit economics on generating
| updated-once-a-year results to queried-once-in-a-million
| searches.
|
| Tl;dr: I feel like the long-tail web (90s) was better, but
| economics pushed high-update-frequency more-centralized
| results.
| viccis wrote:
| This is just a blog ring.
|
| I would also love to go back to Geocities style web
| interaction, but the medium is the message, and the way the
| Internet has evolved as a medium means that people don't
| naturally interact with it in a way that supports regression to
| that era. Attempts to force it like neocities have a hyperreal
| quality to them.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Well, it's much harder for them to add content from websites
| that don't have a feed.
| marcd35 wrote:
| I'm one of the contributors for the Obsidian RSS reader
| (https://github.com/amatya-aditya/obsidian-rss-dashboard) and one
| of my first contributions to the project was adding in the Kagi
| RSS feed to the discover page!
|
| It refreshes every 5 hours and shows you the most recent blogs
| published on Kagi. Check it out!
| papakatsu wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about payment processing for
| shareware applications.
| Venn1 wrote:
| Ah, this might explain the traffic from Kagi a week or so ago.
| I've been scratching my head over that one. I just checked, and
| my wee little blog is listed in smallweb.txt. Neat!
|
| Curious what goes on behind the Next Post and Show Similar
| buttons.
| the_axiom wrote:
| I have the impression that Kagi is trending here every month
| barbazoo wrote:
| Love Kagi and most things they do, don't get me wrong, but this
| is a bit ironic:
|
| https://kagi.com/smallweb/?url=https://pliutau.com/reading-l...
|
| > This page is auto-generated from Github Actions workflow that
| runs every day at night and fetches the 5 latest articles from
| each of my favorite blogs.
| starkparker wrote:
| First impressions: My first five pages were stallman.org, a
| paywalled cybersec newsletter, a German-language blog, an AI-
| generated blog post ad for a cattle fencing service, and a blog
| republishing a Disney Parks press release
| __erik wrote:
| This is cool, it reminds me of stumbleupon from back in the day
| wei03288 wrote:
| The discoverability problem for small sites is a distribution
| issue more than a quality issue. Most independent blogs produce
| genuinely useful content, but search engines have structurally
| deprioritized them in favor of sites with SEO budgets and link
| networks. What's interesting about Kagi's approach is that it
| doesn't try to fix the ranking algorithm -- it just adds a
| separate signal. The question is whether that signal stays clean
| as it scales, or whether it becomes another thing people optimize
| for.
| hitekker wrote:
| Kagi lost focus. I pay for their search and I'm getting close to
| giving up. I've noticed several times that Google Search gets
| more relevant results for the same query. On top of having a
| better search AI.
|
| Whimsical detours like this feels like they're operating aa early
| Google minus the killer product.
| Computer0 wrote:
| The commits in their repo for this project goes back multiple
| years. I don't believe it is a whimsical detour.
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