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.
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).
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 ..
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
The first random page it returned to me was this — https://gaultier.github.io/blog/how_to_make_your_own_static_... — which was about building one's own static site generator, which I really liked. I did not realise when I closed that page how hard it would be to find it again, because, of course every new visit to Kagi returns a different page :-)
I run a Hugo blog and I get more interesting referral traffic from Kagi's small web index than from Google at this point. 5,000 curated sites is small enough to be useful most "indie web" directories are graveyards unfortunately..
How do we keep getting surprised by enshittification!?
The worst case scenario is that AI runs everything, we have no skills, and are completely dependent on it...and it shows us crummy commercials and subtly steers us to paid placement with no recourse whatsoever. I hate this possible future, but this is where the money will lead.
Can we just agree that the internet is broken and no amount of boutique search solutions will save it? Kagi, DDG, Google they are all trying to do a search in a pile of steaming sh*, in a hope of finding that shining diamond.
Quite possible that people will come up with a solution eventually. Like Samizdat was a solution to censorship and a broken publishing system in USSR.
52 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadThere 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
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).
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?
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
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.
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)
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.
The worst case scenario is that AI runs everything, we have no skills, and are completely dependent on it...and it shows us crummy commercials and subtly steers us to paid placement with no recourse whatsoever. I hate this possible future, but this is where the money will lead.
:-)
Quite possible that people will come up with a solution eventually. Like Samizdat was a solution to censorship and a broken publishing system in USSR.