I’m not a huge fan of Kagi’s products and services. Their web search is not free. Kagi Translate seems to be temporarily free, and it usually performs great translations, except when it hallucinates or when using the app, you give it an image, and instead of returning a verbatim translation, Kagi Translate makes a whole story in reinterpreting and explaining the text, as if you were using Kagi Summarize. There is an explanation for that: Kagi Translate uses a combination of LLMs under the hood.

As a matter of fact, the Ultimate plan offers you, beyond unlimited search, Kagi Assistant with Research mode and access to GLM-5.1, GLM-5.1 (reasoning), Claude 4.5 Haiku, Claude 4.6 Sonnet, Claude 4.7 Opus, Claude 4.6 Sonnet (reasoning), Claude 4.7 Opus (reasoning), Claude 4.5 Haiku (reasoning), GPT 5.5, GPT 5.4 Mini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro (Preview), Mistral Medium 3.5. Oh, and Kagi News is free, but even in the app and with customized topics, it offers too little.

But the surprising offer from Kagi is the so-called Kagi Small Web: a curated selection of about 36,000 websites with human-made contents. Introduced in September 2023, it flew, until recently, under my radar. From their announcement made 32 months ago:

To begin with, 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:

Initially inspired by a vibrant discussion on Hacker News, we began our experiment in late July, highlighting blog posts from HN users within our search results. The positive feedback propelled the initiative forward. Today, our evolving concept boasts a curated list of nearly 6,000 genuine websites featuring people with a wide variety of interests.

Today, Kagi Small Web is using a list of 35,705 websites (the first line of the file is empty), and there is a surprise inside:

Actually, two surprises, because since the last time I visited that file, a gap has been filled:

The only problem is that in the case of my blog, the RSS feed for comments is sometimes more important than the feed for posts.

Kagi Small Web gives me a strange feeling. Each time you open it, it shows a random website from that list, and you can always tap on next, next, next… The design of the mobile app is better, with prominent Blogs, Videos, Code, Comics and Liked sections (I only use Blogs), and a filter by topics:

I have no idea which category my blog belongs to!

Now, I got a weird feeling when opening Kagi Small Web. These are not the times of Geocities and AltaVista, when any new site was welcomed. We’re submerged in digital content to the point we crave a digital detox. Sure, in a web full of digital slop, of clickbait, and of the worst possible crap, some genuine blogs can be a breath of fresh air, but I still feel odd. I liken it to using TikTok in the sense that the user is browsing through random content in the hope of finding something worthwhile. At the same time, some of the suggested blogs are grotesquely old-school. Their authors didn’t find out that today, people have Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube channels where they behave like TV stations, with daily streams or videos, as if an entire planet would be interested in their futile and usually idiotic utterances!

That said, how about a quick and dirty random selection of random posts from randomly served sites by Kagi Small Web?

  1. 🤖 GPT Image 2 Changed My Mind on AI Visuals: I had quietly written ChatGPT off for image generation. Then GPT Image 2 showed me a technical diagram of a washing machine, and I had to revise that judgment.
  2. 🌐 From random to recommended: exploring the indie web: About Kagi Small Web, Blogosphere, and Bubbles. The last one is nice, and it even has a section in German. OMG, are we creating parallel DMOZes? From Bubbles:
    1. 🤔 Scams That We Just Accept: Insurance, College, Cars, Warranties, Free Shipping, Online subscriptions.
    2. 🖥️ Just Fucking Use Go: Hey, dipshit. You know what compiles in two seconds, deploys as a single binary, and doesn’t shit itself when a transitive dependency gets yanked from npm at 3am? Go. … But no. You’re out there gluing together fifteen Node packages, three TypeScript build tools, and a Kubernetes cluster to serve a fucking form. You hired a Platform Team to babysit your Rails monolith. You convinced your CTO that Rust was necessary for a CRUD app that does maybe forty requests a second. … Stop looking for a framework, you absolute walnut. The standard library is the framework. … Rails needs a deploy ritual involving Capistrano, three config files, and a goat. Django wants you to learn its ORM, its admin, its middleware system, and its opinions about everything. Express is held together with npm audit warnings and prayers. Next.js changes its routing conventions every six months and gaslights you about it.
    3. 🤔 the dumbphone idea is nothing but an idea. Also, my wife and her dumbphone.
    4. ℹ️ This is why I’m fat.
    5. ℹ️ ereaders and syncing: About the cheap Xteink X4.
    6. ℹ️ Why You Take Notes But Never Get Smarter. Oh, no, Zettelkasten!
  3. 🖥️ CLI for Your Notes in The Archive – Automated Zettelkasten (Usage) for Programmers. FFS!
  4. 🤖 How a missing quote mark may have caused my Mac to act up: What saved me was Le Chat from Mistral. It showed me how to find the offending file and how to fix it.
  5. 🤔 Yanis Varoufakis: Palantir and the New Order: Neoliberalism is dead. Say hello to Techlordism: A copy of the article published in The Point (Australia) on April 21, 2026
  6. 🤖 Building (and Evaluating) a Codebase Onboarding Skill for Claude Code: It’s a Claude Code skill that scans the current working directory, builds a structured summary of the codebase, and caches it so future conversations can skip the discovery phase entirely.
  7. 🖥️ Quickshell: Build Your Own Desktop on Linux: Quickshell is a modern toolkit built with C++ for creating desktop interface components — bars, widgets, lock screens, launchers, and even complete environments — using QtQuick + QML. It is a foundation for building a custom desktop, running alongside a compositor like Hyprland, Sway, or i3.
  8. 🤖 Friday link potpourri: Including links to posts by Ed Zitron (on AI), Richard Dawkins (also on AI), Lada Nuzhna (on biotech in China), and Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator, with transcript.
  9. 🌐 Thursday links, Nautilus science edition: Among other links, What Your Dream Life Says About You, and How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat?
  10. 🤖 These are your father’s dotfiles: About Claude Code insisting on running stuff like find . -name "*.py" | xargs grep "function_name" across a fifty-thousand-line codebase, burning tokens like mad, waiting, waiting — when ctags could have answered in milliseconds.
  11. 🖥️ AltTab: On MacOS, the cmd tab keyboard shortcut only switches between apps, not the individual windows. I use apps like Firefox, where I have multiple windows open and so the MacOS solution does not work for me. Furthermore, I want to see the thumbnails of the windows, not just the app icons. AltTab is a fantastic open-source tool that solves both of these problems on MacOS for me.
  12. 🤖 A gem of a Gem: I’ve been using Gemini Pro for almost a year now. I pay google £14 a month and get a single seat on Business Workspace, 2TB of storage and Gemini Pro. Plus some other stuff probably that I don’t use. … But, for now, I want to highlight a very useful Gem I created. Gems are a way to have custom chat with knowledge preloaded about a particular topic. The knowledge can be set as a combination of text instructions, uploaded files, imported code bases and NotebookLM contents.

Life is too short to explore even the Small Web!