Kagi Revives Old-School Search With Human-Curated Websites
▼ Summary
– The article contrasts the early human-made web with the current monetized, AI-driven internet.
– Kagi offers a paid search engine (starting at $5/month) focused on privacy, with no ads or sponsored results.
– Kagi argues paying for search is better than giving up data or seeing ads, and uses its own indexes for unbiased results.
– Kagi’s Small Web project highlights human-made, curated sites, with a random “Next Post” button similar to old StumbleUpon.
– Kagi has expanded beyond search with AI models, Android/iOS apps, and a free trial allowing 100 searches.
If you remember the internet before smartphones, you might recall a time when websites were built by actual people. You could visit a directory like AltaVista or Yahoo and browse categories such as Home & Family, Science, and Computers. Inside those listings, you’d find pages crafted by hobbyists, academics, and tech enthusiasts. Communities thrived on forums and bulletin boards, and web developers often avoided images because they slowed down page loading. Watching a video online felt almost impossible.
Fast forward to today, and the web has transformed almost beyond recognition. Nearly everything is monetized to the extreme, from search results and forums to social media and news outlets. Powerful apps now run inside browsers, while AI is actively reducing the need for the open web altogether. A growing number of companies want to revive the old web’s spirit, and Kagi is leading that charge. For several years, Kagi has offered a search engine focused on privacy and security. Now, it has expanded beyond its Google alternative to curate a “small web” of sites driven and written by humans.
The Kagi Search Engine
Since search is Kagi’s core business, it’s the logical starting point. Using Kagi costs a small fee, starting at $5 a month (plus sales tax) for 300 searches. That price includes a standard-level AI assistant to help you make sense of what you find. For $10 a month, you get unlimited searches and more AI assistant tokens. If you want to test it first, there’s a free trial offering 100 searches.
Kagi makes a compelling case for paying for search. The company explains that searching the web always costs you something,either directly with dollars, by sharing data about your online activity, or by wading through more ads and sponsored links. Beyond privacy, Kagi aims to improve search quality by serving results free from paid promotions or Google’s shifting business priorities. It maintains its own web and news indexes and prioritizes “relevant, high quality results” and noncommercial sites.
Getting started is simple: just provide an email address and password. Then you can begin with 100 free searches. Open the search options panel to narrow results to images, videos, podcasts, maps, or news, or to filter by time or language. For me, using Kagi feels like stepping back in time. Searching for a band, for example, brings up its official website, Wikipedia page, social media accounts, and YouTube channel,all without promoted results, related searches, or sponsored content like concert tickets. It’s closer to how search results used to appear.
Kagi’s Small Web Project
Kagi now offers more than just search. The company provides access to multiple AI models and is actively building its Small Web project, which highlights the best of human-made and human-curated internet. It recently launched apps for Android and iOS as well. The goal, in Kagi’s words, is to avoid a web “dominated by algorithms, ads, and AI-generated noise.” It resembles the old StumbleUpon, if you remember that far back. There’s a Next Post button to jump randomly to something new, allowing you to favorite what you see or search for something specific. A Share button is also included, of course.
(Source: Wired)
