Kagi Launches Mobile Apps To Surface Indie, Human-Made Websites

Palo Alto search company Kagi has released mobile apps that bring its curated collection of independently run websites to iPhone and Android users, pitching the tools as a way to find human-written pages amid a flood of AI-created content. The new Small Web apps, paired with browser add-ons and category filters announced in March, let people browse handpicked blogs, comics, personal videos and other noncommercial pages that the company says reflect the early internet’s do-it-yourself spirit.

The Small Web collection is a set of sites chosen for their individual authorship — personal journals, niche webcomics, small video channels and code repositories among them — rather than sites backed by big ad networks or platform publishers. Kagi positions the effort as a remedy for discovery problems: many independent pages get buried on today’s search results, especially as algorithmically generated content grows more common and harder to distinguish from human work.

Kagi’s discovery interface resembles older “random surf” services: hit a button to land on a selected site and keep going. The apps add ways to narrow results by topic or type of content, a distraction-free reading option, lists of recent and popular finds, and the ability to bookmark favorites for later. The company says its index includes over thirty thousand entries — roughly three out of one hundred thousand when compared to a million — and users can limit exploration to whatever categories interest them.

Not everyone is satisfied. Discussions on developer and tech forums have flagged limits in Kagi’s inclusion rules, noting the system only ingests sites that expose RSS feeds with recent updates; that automatically excludes single-page experiments and many static projects. Some users also reported encountering pages in the Small Web that appeared likely to be machine-assisted, raising questions about how strictly human authorship is vetted. Dr. Maya Chen, a researcher who studies web preservation, said the RSS requirement favors regularly updated blogs while sidelining many ephemeral or art-driven pages that don’t publish feeds.

Kagi’s Small Web began as a desktop search feature last year and the mobile push seems aimed at broadening reach as the company explores alternatives to dominant search engines. The startup has positioned parts of its product behind paid tiers in the past, and observers say curated discovery could help it stand out if subscription search doesn’t scale. People who want to nominate sites can still suggest additions through the project’s public repository on GitHub.

For casual users frustrated by an internet increasingly crowded with indistinguishable algorithmic content, the apps offer an easier route to stumbling onto offbeat corners of the web. But if Kagi wants a genuinely diverse catalog, it will likely need to loosen technical entry rules and beef up vetting to keep AI-penned pages from slipping in.