Sounds interesting. I currently pay the 5$/month for the Kagi search engine and that works great so I’m inclined to trust them on their other ventures.
Their ‘Research’ AI is pretty decent too. I can get to the same ends eventually, but I can’t read and digest 25 different pages and then launch another 10 follow-up searches in 15 seconds. It’s summarizing and not simply inferencing so the hallucination rate is acceptably low and it also cites the sources so you can click a footnote to fact-check any important details.
I self-host most things, but I can’t self host a search engine. I much prefer paying monthly than having to fight the eternal battle against tracking and ads.
woooop my sites on there already
Thus including the type of people who screwed everything up in the first place
This Kagi?
Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100% dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely misguided use of the company’s limited funds, I honestly can’t see Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people.
Use of funds is misguided sure, but all the AI stuff is completely optional and has never ever gotten in my way
6 months to a year ago it was all people were recommending, Kagi and searxng. Maybe another paid one I forget the name. Now Kagi is bad?
That article is 2 years old. In the last two years Kagi hasn’t collapsed on itself, it’s not overrun with AI, the world hasn’t ended. They’ve implemented Privacy Pass, extended their browser support to Linux, introduced SlopStop for reporting AI websites, and generally continued to improve their main product.
Kagi is a business, run by people, who make decisions to the best of their ability based on their understanding of what’s going to best serve their needs/priorities.
Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views. That’s what it’s like trying to serve a broad market like “internet search users”. Some of those users are inevitably going to get fired up enough to write a 20,000 word opinion piece on the subject.
For any service, you have to choose if the value proposition makes sense for you and your needs. For me, the value of most free search services has gone down the drain, and the value of spending monthly for Kagi is better than having to think about/maintain a SearXNG instance. YMMV.
This is actually pretty nice. I guess we will see similar projects popping up in the near future.
So, like a baby Yahoo! directory?
I wonder just how long it will stay relevant and how they determine if the content comes from a human. So far I’ve been accused of being a bot several times, clearly reliably detecting humans is beyond the capability of … humans.
Mmm… that’s something a bot would say.
so is that.
So is that
God Elon is embarrassing
It’s always funny rewatching iron man 2 or home alone and being like “oh look, goebbels and hitler!”
or like lemmy? kagi is also very pro activity pub. this feature is kinda old actually. give it a try! also give kagi search a try
Like a small curated stumbleupon. I gave it a few clicks a little while back and as you’d expect theres a pretty wide range of good to junk content on there, but it all felt distinctly human.
Since none of the pages are ad ridden its hard to imagine the AI crazies wasting tokens on something they can’t really monetize.
Whereby they can detect anomalous usage of language. Moreover, using whereby and moreover seem to be key indicators that something is written by ai .
Verily ole chap. Mucho verily
This sounds great. You still need a subscription to use it? I may be the thing that finally convinces me to get one.
I don’t think you need a subscription. I just tried from another browser where I’m not logged in and it works.
They have a small web ‘Lens’ in their search (you can limit search to specific categories), so you’d need to subscribe for that. Although, with an account, you get 100 searches/month for free.
They also have a Fediverse lens:
deleted by creator
Would you call neocities.org a walled garden as well?
Sadly, yes.
What makes it a walled garden?
“Small web” is how usually Gopher, Gemini and such protocols and resources accessible via them are described.
I knew I was right to suspect Kagi, trying to hijack an established name from an important phenomenon is one of the most certain red flags.
In general hijacking of names is one of the dangers very specific to our modern era and not really a problem before the Internet.
And yes, they are doing just that.
They talk about the name in the initial announcement back in 2023 where they link to many blogs discussing the topic.
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
The term is a bit broader than those protocols and Kagi is far from the first to use it; it certainly isn’t a “hijack” as if it was the name if another project or something. ‘Small Web’ isn’t them claiming to own the concept of the small web, or that it’s somehow only accessible through them… It’s just a feature; search, as a curated product they offer and maintain.
It’s just what they named the lens, because it’s a lens for the ‘small web’ as they defined it; like the other lenses. They aren’t hijacking the word ‘academia’ by having an academia lens…
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html#default-lenses
Sure, maybe they could slap ‘Kagi’ in front of ‘Small Web’ just to be sure, but I doubt anyone will confuse the concept of noncommercial small websites with a paid service…
Also
In general hijacking of names is one of the dangers very specific to our modern era and not really a problem before the Internet.
Neat fact: you can trace the roots of trademark law back like 7000 years …
Because I thought you were obviously wrong about the 7000 years thing, here’s a history of trademarks by some guy named Olivier Pierre:
Since ancient times, merchants have been using signs or marks in trade to distinguish their products. Registrations came much later, in the 18th century with the establishment of Intellectual Property Offices.
[…]
The use of trademarks dates back thousands of years, however we can’t date their origins with precision. Some of the earliest forms of identification of marks date from Prehistory. For instance, the Lascaux cave paintings in France show bulls drawings with marks on them. Experts believe that people were using personal marks to claim ownership of livestock, long before literate societies. That was about 15.000 years ago.
The Egyptian masonry from some 6,000 years ago shows distinguishable quarry marks and stonecutters signs, to identify the source of the stone and the laborer who carried out the work to claim their wages. There were creative entrepreneurs who marketed their goods beyond their localities and sometimes over long distances. Wine amphorae marked with seals were found inside the Tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun who reigned between 1336 a.c. to 1327 a.c. over ancient Egypt.
I’ve gotten so used to think of trademarks as registered trademarks, but it makes sense that it has existed much longer in the literal sense. The earliest known law however dates back little more than 4000 years, and there’s nothing about trademarks there, so I think it’s fair to say trademark law is a lot more modern. :)
Sorry for being entirely off-topic.
I’ve seen “small web” used to describe personal sites and blogs in HTTP-land for a while, like how Kagi is using the term. I think it just so happens, due to the nature of protocols like Gopher and Gemini, all of the content there is very personal, so it gets described as small web.
Yes, besides Gopher and Gemini, “small web” usually includes traditionally coded HTML+simple CSS+handmade/small JS websites. I.e. websites that are not using a big JS framework or huge amounts of CSS.
Also, monetizing the ability to find searches that are not AI slop is, for lack of better phrasing, fucking bullshit.
Literally any free search engine could stop serving searches that are slop - Kagi isn’t stopping them.
It’s almost like “free” search engines have ulterior motives for how they prioritize search results.
Right because providing a service has no costs, lol
Worth noting that when it was initially launched, it didn’t have such an emphasis on AI.
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
It just so happens that noncommercial small sites tend to be slop-free, and there’s a big demand for that, so now that’s how they’re marketing it.
