Kagi Brings Back Old-School Search, One Human-Made Website at a Time

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the way the web used to be: sites made and developed by humans.

You could load up a directory like AltaVista or Yahoo and click through categories including Home & Family, Science, and Computers. In those listings you’d find pages put together by hobbyists, academics, and tech nerds.

People gathered around forums and bulletin boards, and web developers tended to avoid putting images on their sites because it would slow down page loading. The idea of watching a video over the internet seemed almost impossible.

In the decades since those formative years, the web has transformed almost beyond recognition. Almost everything is now monetized to the nth degree, from search results and forums to social media and news outlets. Powerful apps and tools now run inside browsers, while AI is hard at work removing the need for the open web altogether.

There are now a good number of companies that are keen to see the spirit of the old web return, and that includes Kagi. For several years Kagi has been running a search engine based on privacy and security. Now Kagi has expanded its efforts beyond its Google-alternative search tool to curate a “small web” of sites driven and written by humans.

The Kagi Search Engine

As Kagi’s main business is its search engine, it makes sense to start here. Searching with Kagi will cost you a small fee (starting at $5 a month, plus sales tax) for 300 searches. The standard-level AI assistant is included in that price; it’ll help you make sense of what you're seeing. You get unlimited searches and more AI assistant tokens for $10 a month. If you want to see what Kagi is like first before committing, there’s a free trial available that allows you 100 searches.

The argument that Kagi puts forward for why you should pay for search is pretty persuasive. As Kagi explains it, searching the web is always going to cost you—it’s just a question of whether you pay directly with dollars, by giving up data about your online activity, or by sifting through an increasing number of ads and sponsored links.

Besides making search more private, Kagi also wants to make it better by serving up results that aren’t influenced by paid promotions or whatever Google’s favored business practices happen to be from month to month. Kagi has its own indexes for web and news, and is built to promote “relevant, high quality results” and noncommercial sites.

To get started with Kagi search, all you need is an email address and password to manage your account. You can then get started with your 100 free searches. Open the search options panel to limit results to images, videos, podcasts, maps or news, or to filter by time or language.

For me, it feels a little bit 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 free of promoted results, related searches, and sponsored content (such as concert tickets). It’s more the way search results used to appear.

Kagi’s Small Web Project

There’s now more to Kagi than search. The company offers access to a multitude of AI models (of course), and is busy building out its Small Web project, which aims to highlight the best of the human-made and human-curated internet. The company recently launched apps for Android and iOS too.

The idea is to avoid a web “dominated by algorithms, ads, and AI-generated noise,” in Kagi’s words. It’s a little like the old StumbleUpon, if you remember that far back. There’s a Next Post button for jumping to something else at random, allowing you to favorite what you see or to search for something specific. There’s a Share button too, of course.

You shouldn’t expect to turn up treasure with every click here, but that’s part of the fun. You’re going to come across a lot of blog posts—posts written by real people, about niche topics. In a few minutes of browsing I discovered posts that debated the nuances of Python, dug into particle physics, and extolled the art of storytelling.

Like the Kagi search engine, it’s a throwback to the old days of the web. Click Topics to narrow the sort of sites you come across. The categories you can pick from include DIY & Making, Travel & Outdoors, Retro, and Pop Culture—just like the old directories that used to be run by AltaVista, Yahoo, and the like.

The experience proved more refreshing than I expected, offering the opportunity to read essays and look at digital art that is just put out there—not to go viral or to make money but just for the sake of displaying creativity and sharing something with the world at large. Kagi just might be on to something here.