Discussion

Kagi Small Web

emehex: StumbleUpon?

timvdalen: I miss StumbleUpon so much!

modernerd: 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/?comichttps://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallcomic....And Small YouTube:https://kagi.com/smallweb/?ythttps://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallyt.txt

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).

postalcoder: Kagi Small Web + Hacker News: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=trueThis filters HN for only stories that appear on Kagi's small web list.

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 ..

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?

drstewart: Some context would be helpful

ViktorRay: Here is a link to the folks at Kagi talking about thishttps://blog.kagi.com/small-web

rdmuser: 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...

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

postalcoder: And Small HN:https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true

kilroy123: There are still a lot of alternatives:http://cloudhiker.nethttps://www.offscopes.comNewsletter version if you prefer: https://randomdailyurls.com

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

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

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

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

freetonik: On a similar note, I maintain and grow a manually curated collection of personal blogs with valid RSS feeds: https://minifeed.net/blogsThe 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.[1] https://minifeed.net/blogs/by/random[2] https://minifeed.net/global/random

Kovah: Hi, creator of Cloudhiker here. Thanks for mentioning my site! Let me know if you have any questions, issues or ideas.

8organicbits: 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/

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.

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.

criley2: Kagi is a for-profit corporation.

HelloUsername: Related recent blog post "Small Web Just Got Bigger" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366230 13-march-2026Previous 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

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

yashasolutions: 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)

WhereIsTheTruth: You remind me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678#46709862

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.

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.

Terretta: 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.

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

hrmtst93837: What you describe sounds more like a large ElasticSearch like full-text index over the entire internet.

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

unbindableisaac: 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.

codethief: 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.

user3939382: 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.

ArtificeAccount: Whatever it was called, it was way better than whatever Google is doing currently.

sodapopcan: In fairness, there wasn't the level of utter crap back then that there is now. Not that there wasn't a LOT back then, but there is even more now.

ArtificeAccount: The enshittification of everything has really put a damper on the technological optimism that seemed to be the norm back then.

the_pwner224: 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 it still better than Google? Probably, I don't really know because I don't use Google anymore. But at this point the only reason I'm still paying for it is out of inertia. One of these days I'll re-evaluate Google and decide whether to switch back.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.

ArtificeAccount: I feel the same way. I'm probably going to end my subscription at some point, but right now the effort involved is what's keeping me with Kagi.

ArtificeAccount: 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.

zknill: 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.