Kagi Small Web
Kagi (Hacker News):
While there is no single definition, “small web” typically refers to the non-commercial part of the web, crafted by individuals to express themselves or share knowledge without seeking any financial gain. This concept often evokes nostalgia for the early, less commercialized days of the web, before the ad-supported business model took over the internet (and we started fighting back!)
For a deeper understanding, Ben Hoyt’s “The Small Web is Beautiful” serves as an excellent primer. Additionally, our GitHub repository links to several more articles on this topic.
Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the “small web.” We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways:
- Directly within Kagi search results for applicable queries (existing Kagi members do not need to do anything, this will be automatic)
- Via the new Kagi Small Web website
- Through the Kagi Small Web RSS feed
- Via our Search API, where results are now part of the news enrichment API
I’ll be interested to see whether this improves the rankings when I search with Kagi. Even before this change, they were often quite different than with Google and Bing, with top results less likely to be spammy. I’m pleased that my blog is included, and Kagi Small Web does seem to be helping more people to find my posts.
Surely authority and relevance carry heavier weighting in ranking these search results, but the idea of bringing more independent voices with fresh links onto a search results page is intriguing. The fact that it is based on an allow-list means it is more limited, but also perhaps less prone to manipulation.
Google used to have a feature called Blog Search that restricted the search results to those from blogs, and we really need that back.
(I suspect part of what killed it was the increasing difficulty of weeding out legions of hijacked or otherwise spam-infested WordPress and Blogger blogs; overcoming that would be a necessary component of any resurrection of Blog Search.)
Previously:
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I'd happily pay for Kagi, i just find their subscription model a bit... limited;
Basically it's $10 / month, which is too much for me, and even at that price the searches are limited.
Even if i don't search at all for 2 weeks because i'm "offline", i'm still paying the full price.
Also: not a fan of linking all my searches to a personal account.
As I've said before, I've used Kagi as my primary search for a while. I am quite happy to see them working on something other than chasing the AI bubble (which they have been doing, along with Raycast), and on top of that it actually sounds very unique and useful.