Update Sept 30: Kite is now officialy released as Kagi News.
Kagi, the company behind my search engine of choice, is offering Kite their open source news feed that focuses on providing… actual news. Unlike what we’ve grown used to, this one is not an attention grabber nor a buzz addict that will crap out meaningless content. I’ll let Kite introduce itself:
Driven by relentless ad monetization, news has become mental junk food - easy to consume but toxic to our minds, triggering stress responses and interrupting deep thought. We can do better, by going back to the essence of journalism - to inform and educate citizens.
Kite itself is a simple and short feed that’s updated once a day—no endless scrolling. Each news title can be clicked to display a summary, some key information, a timeline of the events and sources. And since it’s from Kagi, it’s also ad-free, and there is no tracking, no seo crap. Th efeed offers little settings like the number of news displayed (12, max), preselected type of news by categories and countries (limited selection, for the time being?), odfdly enough a toggle to play music, and that’s about it.
It’s simple. And that’s what I like about it. Could it be better? Sure. But it’s already so refreshing. And that’s what I find sad: realizing we’ve reached such a low point in our news we need to be reminded that’s what journalism was supposed to be about. But there is no use in crying about that, it’s much better to appreciate what’s moving in the rigt direction.
Thx for Kagi News, Kagi.
Kite doesn’t seem to be officially available yet (it’s not listed alongside their other apps/services) I stumbled upon it reading this post I was suggested by indieblog.page a search engine focusing on personal blogs i read about in the Web Reveival community back on Lemmy. So, thx the small Web too ;)
What is Kagi?
Like I said, Kagi is my default search engine. It has been for over a year and it has been a really excellent and refreshing experience worth its price. Because, unlike Kite, Kagi is a paid search engine (free trial available).
Kagi is a small US company funded by its user’s money (not by selling ads, not by Venture Capital). It is building what I consider is already the best alternative to the classical search engines out there, including Google (and I mean Google back when it used to provide actual useful results, not the useless crap it has turned into).
Kagi is completely ad-free and tracking free. It offers an impressive selection of tools to filter and to focus search results on certain types of content, as well as to promote and to exclude some domains (that alone make it worth its price imho, as I never have to see those crap websites that Google is listing only because they pay them more money than actual useful websites). It’s minimalist but highly configurable at the same time. It also offers a neat ‘Small Web’ search tool that will focus only on small personal websites and blogs. If you have not given it a try, go for it, there is no string attached to their trial plan: you get 100 searches for free. Then, if you decide to keep on using it, you select the search plan you want ranging from 5$ to 25$/month. Back then, I was so impressed I switched to a paid plan maybe two or three days after I started using the trial plan. I was so happy to get my hands back on what search engines used to be: useful (and, with Kagi, quite innovative too).
Like I promised, on this blog you will never see ads or sponsored content and I will only mention products and services I actually use and think are great (and that I pay for with my own money). Kagi is one such product.
Published: 2025/01/30