June 27, 2025 web tech
What’s going on, Internet? I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023 and have spent a bit of time curating my ideal Internet search experience using the tools Kagi offers.
Kagi is a premium search engine that puts you first. Unlike traditional search engines that monetise your attention through ads and data tracking, Kagi delivers clean, accurate results while maintaining complete privacy. Kagi is built on a simple principle, you're our customer, not our product.
The main selling point for me is that Kagi isn’t powered by AdTech and allows us who have the money to pay a monthly fee for a pleasant search experience. I’m paying $14 USD/month for the Duo Family plan that gives me and my wife a Professional Plan each. That alone would make me happy, nice ad free web searching. A subscription worth having.
With payment out of the way the two features I absolutely love are Lenses and Personal Results.
Lenses allow you to customise searches by specifying which websites you see in your results. Kagi provide a few Lenses by default, but you’re also able to create your own. You can create as many lenses as you want, but can only have up to 20 activated at a time at the moment.
Personalised Results allow you to block, lower, raise or pin particular websites/domains which determines how they’re showing in your search results. These are easily managed right away from the search results page by clicking on the little shield icon where each of the personalised options are available.
Kagi also make Domain Insights available so you can check out the most promoted or blocked domains. If you already have an account and are logged in you can easily kick start your block list from this page by toggling any of the listed domains to blocked. You can also lower, raise or pin any of the domains too.
I’ve been curating my block list since I started with Kagi and was pretty happy with it until I came across this post Sneaky SEO Shenanigans Suck from Bobby Hiltz which I bookmarked back in January this year.
In the post Bobby describes an article he read about the decline of Google, shitty search results and how 16, yes just 16 companies dominate the web with their individual brands that plague and polute search results with crap.
This led him to create and share a set of filters to use in uBlacklist to use in Google and other provider searches.
I’ve taken those and added them to my existing list of domains to block within Kagi, you can find the list here, Flamed Fury Kagi Blog List. You can copy and paste these directly into the Kagi blocked domains in your settings page.
Lenses are a fun way to search and surf the web. One of the default Lenses provided by Kagi is Small Web which allows you to search through all the websites listed on the Kagi Small Web repo.
I’ve made one slightly different and called it Smaller Web which attempts to find results in known small web communities, leprd.space, bearblog.dev, smol.pub, pika.page, nekoweb.org, weblog.lol, dreamwidth.org, neocities.org. This doesn’t find any homepages on these services with a custom domain, nor does it find sites like Flamed Fury who are self hosted. I feel that this can be used nicely in combination with the default Kagi Small Web lense with sites on these hosting platforms that aren’t specifically listed in the repo.
The other is The Old Web that lets you search through small website hosts from years gone by, geocities.ws, geocities.restorativland.org, tripod.com, members.tripod.com, fortunecity.ws, angelfire.com. I love having a search through these every now and then to see what people were saying about DMX or Limp Bizkit back in the day.
The two lense links above will only work if you’re already a Kagi member and logged in.
That’s all I have for now, catch you on the flip side!
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