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.
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]
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 ..
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.
And yes, Google's founders were right that web ads would kill that experience you want.
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)
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
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)
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.
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
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?
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web