Kagi Small Web (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

You'd probably like the small web search on Marginalia then: https://marginalia-search.com/

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.

yeah i agree. the crux of it is no corporations / no ads / no astroturfing.

Well, it's much harder for them to add content from websites that don't have a feed.

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

https://wiby.me/ is interesting. I am not sure if it updates, or if it just has old websites.

I wish someone curated a list of sites that are llm written - but are not spam. Just to compare :)

I was interested in something like this for while, thank you!

And Small HN:

https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714 (Ask HN: Share your personal website, 2414 comments)

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.

Im surprised nobody has mentioned cloudhiker which is made to be like stumbleupon.

SU was amazing. Stumbling upon Ze Frank? It was internet gold!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Funny to look back and recall how useful web search actually was at one point. Ahh the good old days.

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.

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.

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.

What you describe sounds more like a large ElasticSearch like full-text index over the entire internet.

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.

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.

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.

Disagree, I love it, at least as good as Google

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).

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)

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.

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).

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.

Agreed, I have not been impressed with Kagi at all.

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.

> 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.

You should try that on more niche user-centric search engines, like https://altpower.app

So glad I discovered it!

> 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.

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.

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.

It’s a search engine, not a global grep.

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

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.

I have the complete opposite experience and it works wonders for me.

Why have you used it for months now if you're not impressed?

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.

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.

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.

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...

do you not have a browser history?

Welcome to 2026 when the next door neighbour is an AI datacentre using up all your groundwater.

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/

It would've been ironic if we had infinite resources, but this entire project is built and maintained by one person - me. If this is the only thing you found wrong with it - I'll pat myself on the back :)

ps. If you don't want to see this blog again in Small Web, jsut submit a PR to remove it - index of sites is a crowd-sourced effort. Cheers

The criteria are here: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb#small-web

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.

If you’re not signed into GitHub, it always throws those errors page (maybe due to scrapping being done with residential IP addresses).

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...

There are still a lot of alternatives:

http://cloudhiker.net

https://www.offscopes.com

Newsletter version if you prefer: https://randomdailyurls.com

I miss StumbleUpon so much!

First thing I thought... honestly we should bring it back anyway

doesn't solve the root problem, but maybe try searching for the topic in kagi with the small web lens?

Tried it myself, first three I got were also about AI.

Curious if there are any statistics on which topics people are writing about.

Next post is random. Show similar uses semantic search to find most similar indexed post. You also get the same effect if you 'like' a post.

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.

Here is a link to the folks at Kagi talking about this

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

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.

The commits in their repo for this project goes back multiple years. I don't believe it is a whimsical detour.

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."

We can create worlds, not just inhabit ones created by corporations.