StumbleUpon is BACK! | The Trouble with Travis

Do ya’ll remember StumbleUpon? I do.

Picture it! The year was 2007! The Colbert Report was on television my friends and I were drinking beers and playing D&D. Not a smartphone in sight but what I did have was my laptop connected to my buddies cable internet. I kept clicking “Stumble!” on my stumbleupon browser extention and it’d bring up a fun, new random website from the internet.

Lots of stuff! Random flash games, blogs, puzzles with way to much CSS, and more! It was fantastic! It made the internet feel vast and expansive. There was seemingly a limitless pool of creative folks all generating content on their own servers for no reason other than it was fun. Well, and probably to generate traffic so they could sell their domain or post advertisements.

Now, I don’t know about you but in 2026 the internet feels a lot more like just five websites. Seven if you’re a disappointment to your parents.

Well, Kagi aims to change all that with their new Small Web feature.

What is Kagi? I’m so glad you asked. Kagi is like google, but you pay for it. Plans start at $5 bucks a month with a trail to find out if it’s for you. Before you yell at me and say something like, “Why am I paying for a search engine when Google is free?!” consider this:

Nothing is free. If you’re not paying, you are the product.

What Kagi is selling is a better search engine experience without advertisements, without tracking, and without selling every scrap of your personal information to the highest bidder. They also offer their small web feature!

Kagi describes their small web feature as “a part of our ongoing pursuit to humanize the web” and I couldn’t be behind more of an effort more.

While it’s not yet providing for me nifty flash games that are probably installing a virus and keylogger on my pc just by loading up into my browser, it has provided for me some interesting blogs I wouldn’t have otherwise found. Try it out for yourself! While you’re at it, buy a domain and do something (anything) with it. Let’s make the internet fun again.