Ask HN: The sites gaming Kagi Small Web are ruining the experience | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The sites gaming Kagi Small Web are ruining the experience

2 pointschris_money2025 comments

Do you agree? Today has been especially bad with sites triggering leaving the app to go to my default browser. It seems like they are doing it on purpose. Not really sure what you do to fix this because the moment Kagi puts in some sort of algorithm we’re then just chasing the inevitable of social media algorithm equivalents.

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For being supposedly human curated, it's shocking how much garbage has infiltrated the smallweb.txt registry. I have an agent with browser access running right now checking it and it's close to ~10%... Here's a sample of 10 examples that were found in literally the last two minutes...

- "vermontdailychronicle.com" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "ziggit.dev" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "fastfrwrd.info" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "evchargingstations.com" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "escapecollective.com" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "findingada.com" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "fontsinuse.com" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "fortelabs.com" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "forum.f-droid.org" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

- "42zero.org" : https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/5aa8a7740149bd67...

Welcoming a PR to fix it.

What’s the review process for all this? It looks to only be you based on git and your HN bio. Can you get some trusted community lieutenants who can police the lists and create a file with their names ? And then anyone can raise a PR to remove or add someone to that list of lieutenants and enough approvals from community can get the PR through. I’m not super familiar with GitHub settings but sure there is a way to setup some sort of democratic process for this.

Love the site btw, but I fear if you don’t get some help you’re going to trust all PRs and let them fly and trust people will issue removal PRs. For instance, my girlfriend loves the concept as well and was immediately hooked but she doesn’t know GitHub, so there’s no practical mechanism for her to remove bad content. And editing files on mobile GitHub is a pain, I probably wouldn’t even consider doing it, especially with a text file that big. So there’s going to need to be some sort of loyal community policing or voting system, because at end of day all these sites could be flipped to bad content as soon as they make it past review.

It is a 'best effort' effort. GitHub friction is there on purpose, as it is a one man effort.

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