As artificial intelligence dominates the internet, the Palo Alto-based search engine Kagi it is bringing its curated collection of non-commercial sites built by people on mobile devices through new “Small Web” apps for iOS and Android. the “Small Web,” in Kagi’s definition, includes sites created by people, such as personal blogs, webcomics, independent videos, and more.
These are the types of properties that formed the basis of the early web, before it was dominated by ad-supported business models and platforms controlled by large corporations. They’re also increasingly the kind of sites that can be harder to discover in today’s web, where so much content is infused with, if not directly generated by, AI.
First the search starts launched Her idea for a “Small Web” initiative in 2023, designed to promote this kind of content in its search results and through a dedicated website. In March, the company announced that it is expands these efforts with browser extensions, mobile apps and a way to filter results by category.
THE Small website it’s like a modern era StumbleUpon as it randomly displays one of the selected sites, then allows you to click the “next” button to move to another. Like StumbleUpon, the goal is to help users discover parts of the web they might otherwise have missed.
By adding categories, users can now limit discovery to only those topics of interest from the more than 30,000 “Small Web” sites in Kagi’s index.
These are also available in Kagi’s new mobile apps for iOS and Android and its browser extensions. Here, you can choose the type of content you want to see, such as videos, blogs, code repositories, or comics. You can also view a list of recently viewed or popular websites and read them in distraction-free mode. Plus, you can save your favorite sites and articles to come back to later.
While the initiative to make less-commercialized parts of the indie web more visible is worthy — especially at a time when AI-generated content is masquerading as human creation — some Kagi users complain that the Small Web product doesn’t go far enough.
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In the Hacker News discussion forum, pointed out one person that Kagi limits its selection to sites with RSS feeds that have recent posts, excluding unique single-purpose sites or experimental pages from being included in Kagi’s collection. Another was disappointed to come across a supposed “Small Web” site that sounded suspiciously like it had it is written with AI.
However, the idea of a web of human-curated content that is also written by humans could be something worth creating, especially if Kagi’s original idea to become an alternative to Google by offering a premium, paid search engine does not go out.
In the meantime, people can suggest new sites for the Small Web through it GitHub page.
