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Kagi Small Web

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi Small Web

#31

Post by freediver »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #19

Some Q:s #1 What's the rationale behind favoring recent blog updates? In my experience, recent updates make the weakest search results, more prone to updates and link breakage, and overall tend to be of lower quality. I also wonder if promoting recent content might incentivize pumping out low-quality entries to increase the odds of being listed. #2 In dabbling in the domain I've always ended up with an almost absurd…

Hey Viktor!

#1 There are a couple of factors.

- More recent content tends to be more relevant given the same search query, or at least its freshnes will contribute to it not being completely irrelevant (which is the worse thing you want in a search engine). The quality of it is already guaranteed to some extent by this being a curated list to begin with.

- It was relatively easy to assemble and maintain the list because it relies on RSS feed tech, and there were a lot of sources to seed it.

- Focus on recent writing can encourage some people to write (more) as we had an example highlighted in the blog post. In general, the web needs more high quality, non-commercial content, and this is ultimately what we want to contribute towards with this. By providing a platform (even if very small) to encourage this behavior we get a step closer to the web we like.

#2 In general I agree. Although I should say we did spend effort to create a diverse pool of websites for this initiative (for example I am seeing a lot of economy or photography). Again, we can only encourage the creation of more content in various areas through platforms like Kagi (and Marginalia) and hope that it will work out at the end.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#32

Post by manuelmoreale »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #29
manuelmoreale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so neat! So happy so see the small, independent and more humane web being highlighted. I’m trying to do my part[0] but I have no doubt that a search engine—even if still a niche one— can have a much bigger impact. Really well done Vlad! [0] https://peopleandblogs.com

I kinda wish there was a sort of proper blog-DMOZ. Would make this sort of stuff a lot easier. Right now everyone and their grandma is curating their own blog list. Lots of wasted effort that could be saved by collaborating somehow.

I agree but it’s incredibly hard to collaborate on this kind of projects because everyone has their own take on what should and shouldn’t be included.

Curation is still hard. Also, I personally don’t mind having different curated directories because those will reflect the taste and interests of the curator.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#33

Post by elashri »

freediver wrote: post #20
raybb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you let YouTube channels have advertisements/sponsors but require sites to be ad-free? I understand the spirit of it and don't have any counter examples but seems like a bummer if someone has a nice indie blog but can't be added because they have a few ads or a sponsored post.

Most of the focus was on the website curation. The YT channels were curated from the initial list of sources [1] and then automatically filtered by recency and subscriber count criteria. That is to say that very little other effort was made to curate the YT channels and we expect the user community will contribute to edit the list. Also I was under impression that all YouTube channels had ads, so that is why this was…

I think we are here talking about organic ads (sponsorship, …etc.) not YouTube as platform ads.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#34

Post by BbzzbB »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #26
BbzzbB wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this more likely to have been inspired by marginalia* than a personal blogs thread? Doesn't seem to have the same results from the Apple Watch example, but it's what immediately came to mind for me when I read this post's title. * https://search.marginalia.nu , commonly mentioned on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?query=marginalia

Vlad was dabbling with similar things to Marginalia with Teclis around the same time Marginalia first made headlines. And to be fair, I was simultaneously inspired by the blog thread to build a curated blog filter for my search engine, which led to a series of changes that overall tends to promote more of this types of results in general. The fact that we're several to have similar ideas sort of validates the ideas I…

Interesting lore, thanks.

I'm not complaining, glad there's more tools for searching outside the scope of SEO spam or content mills, and competition can only make the niche better (presumably, unless it gets big enough to incentivize disguising commercial content as niche blogs). Just felt like it might be a bit disingenuous to quote a blog list as inspiration for a search engine focused on "the non-commercial part of the web" which is exactly your engine's aim and wording, didn't know they've been working on small web initiatives since a similar timeline.

Hopefully you both find success and with it uplift hobbyist websites.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#35

Post by freediver »

elashri wrote: post #33
freediver wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the focus was on the website curation. The YT channels were curated from the initial list of sources [1] and then automatically filtered by recency and subscriber count criteria. That is to say that very little other effort was made to curate the YT channels and we expect the user community will contribute to edit the list. Also I was under impression that all YouTube channels had ads, so that is why this was…

I think we are here talking about organic ads (sponsorship, …etc.) not YouTube as platform ads.

Thanks for clarifying. Yeah we should establish a criterion around that. Curating YT is much more work it feels like. Let's see how "Small YouTube" [1] feels like to begin with and we can take it from there.

[1] https://kagi.com/smallweb/?yt

Re: Kagi Small Web

#36

Post by waveBidder »

kickdaddy wrote: post #5

Kagi is worth every penny. Been using it for 6 months as my primary search engine. I think I have used the Google !g 10 or so times in that period maybe?

one nice feature I found recently: you can actually search special characters: R "%%" actually explains operator, rather than linking to random websites about R.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#37

Post by vladstudio »

Vlad, you're awesome! It's hard to tell to what extent it is actually beneficial for users or your company, but I feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing these kinds of things still happen in modern Internet.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#38

Post by freediver »

vladstudio wrote: post #37

Vlad, you're awesome! It's hard to tell to what extent it is actually beneficial for users or your company, but I feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing these kinds of things still happen in modern Internet.

Hah, thanks. It was one of those things that I just wanted to do and I actually wrote 100% of code for this end to end which took me a good part of a month. Not the best use of CEOs time you might say, but it was fun and felt right.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#40

Post by freediver »

bennyp101 wrote: post #23

Pretty cool - just wondering why one of the requirements is "The website can appear in an iframe"?

That is a requirement for it to be featured in the KSW website (as it uses iframes to embed). We will still crawl it and surface in search results regardless..
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