Kagi is bringing its Small Web collection to mobile devices, offering access to more than 30,000 personal blogs, webcomics, independent videos, and other non-commercial sites it describes as human-authored. The project responds to a web where search results increasingly mix personal writing with material produced or polished by machines. Discovery becomes an act of choosing which kind of voice deserves to appear.

The gesture is attractive because it reverses the usual logic of scale. Instead of asking an index to contain everything, Kagi curates a smaller field and sends the user from one site to another, recalling StumbleUpon and the informal pleasures of the early web. Curation also creates a new authority. Someone must decide whether a site is independent, recent, and human enough to enter the collection. RSS requirements already exclude pages that do not publish regularly, and users have found entries that sound suspiciously synthetic. The human web therefore needs procedures for recognizing humans, a paradox that turns authorship into a property administered by an index. The personal page survives, but first it must pass through a directory.