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.
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freetonik
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]
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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ArtificeAccount
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.
It refreshes every 5 hours and shows you the most recent blogs published on Kagi. Check it out!
azangru
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 :-)
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barbazoo
Love Kagi and most things they do, don't get me wrong, but this is a bit ironic:
> 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.
arscan
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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erremerre
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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Aachen
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
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input_sh
Could've at least checked if the website even allows embedding before embedding it, I found two by randomly clicking around that don't.
My blog was getting traffic from that domain! So that is what that is.
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Venn1
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
I have the impression that Kagi is trending here every month
__erik
This is cool, it reminds me of stumbleupon from back in the day
unbindableisaac
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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starkparker
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
myth_drannon
Too many AI or relegion related sites.
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titzer
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.
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papakatsu
I thought this was going to be about payment processing for shareware applications.
lich_king
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.
drstewart
Some context would be helpful
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jwelten
Interesting, really like the idea. Maybe in the future a possibility to use it in multiple languages
lelanthran
This is fantastic - how long do I have to press F5 before my blog shows up?
:-)
7777777phil
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_goody
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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apples_oranges
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 ..
myth_drannon
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.
WhereIsTheTruth
Kagi wants to exist in a world that doesn't need it anymore
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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!
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 :-)
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.
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.
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).
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
Could've at least checked if the website even allows embedding before embedding it, I found two by randomly clicking around that don't.
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
StumbleUpon?
My blog was getting traffic from that domain! So that is what that is.
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.
I have the impression that Kagi is trending here every month
This is cool, it reminds me of stumbleupon from back in the day
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.
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
Too many AI or relegion related sites.
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.
I thought this was going to be about payment processing for shareware applications.
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.
Some context would be helpful
Interesting, really like the idea. Maybe in the future a possibility to use it in multiple languages
This is fantastic - how long do I have to press F5 before my blog shows up?
:-)
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..
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?
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 ..
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.
Kagi wants to exist in a world that doesn't need it anymore