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 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'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.
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.
*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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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'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 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 :(.
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).
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.
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 !!!
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.
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'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]
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)
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.
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
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 :-)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Also, from the Kagi privacy pass FAQ at https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#faq:
Personally I don't like being signed in during searches, this seems like a good solution."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.
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.
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.
I wonder if the EU could fine them a couple weeks of revenue for this. Seems illegal.
I guess because it isn't then trivial for a web browser to do, indexing every text ever rendered?
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.
I see a problem with this.
The assistant is a nice addition but it’s search is superior for me.
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.
Also on Kagi if you see bad results, you can flag the website to ignore it.
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
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'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 :(.
It really feels either intentional or egregiously incompetent.
[1]: [The Man Who Killed Google Search](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
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.
And yes, Google's founders were right that web ads would kill that experience you want.
It refreshes every 5 hours and shows you the most recent blogs published on Kagi. Check it out!
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.
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
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
https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714 (Ask HN: Share your personal website, 2414 comments)
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)
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
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).
https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/
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
There are a surprising amount out there: https://blog.woblick.dev/en/2025/best-stumbleupon-alternativ...
http://cloudhiker.net
https://www.offscopes.com
Newsletter version if you prefer: https://randomdailyurls.com
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.
:-)
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.
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.
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Curious if there are any statistics on which topics people are writing about.
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?
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.
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.