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Kagi Small Web

249 pointsby trueduketoday at 9:53 AM50 commentsview on HN

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ArtificeAccounttoday at 11:40 AM

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.

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freetoniktoday at 11:05 AM

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

yashasolutionstoday at 11:30 AM

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)

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erremerretoday at 10:25 AM

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).

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input_shtoday at 11:46 AM

Could've at least checked if the website even allows embedding before embedding it, I found two by randomly clicking around that don't.

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arscantoday at 11:16 AM

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.

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azangrutoday at 11:57 AM

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 :-)

HelloUsernametoday at 11:23 AM

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

emehextoday at 10:00 AM

StumbleUpon?

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unbindableisaactoday at 11:16 AM

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.

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7777777philtoday at 12:18 PM

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..

sam_goodytoday at 10:43 AM

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?

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drstewarttoday at 10:39 AM

Some context would be helpful

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jweltentoday at 11:08 AM

Interesting, really like the idea. Maybe in the future a possibility to use it in multiple languages

apples_orangestoday at 10:46 AM

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 ..

WhereIsTheTruthtoday at 10:49 AM

Kagi wants to exist in a world that doesn't need it anymore

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