Kagi, Orion and Gopher

• ~600 words • 3 minute read

The last week of the year is a time for rest and reflection. During that downtime, I decided to try Kagi and Orion and spent more time than I should have setting up a Gopher site, just for kicks.

Kagi & Orion

Kagi is a paid search engine and Orion is a privacy-minded browser they built on Webkit—not Blink!—exclusively for macOS, at least for now.

Everything about those choices sounds like someone actively whittling down their market share to something so small and specific most VCs would scoff. But somehow, they seem to have cobbled together a surprisingly robust business?

I listened to Vlad Prelovac (the founder) talk about the history of the company, their design choices and a lot of other things on The Talk Show (the companion podcast to Daring Fireball):

There's something charming and inspiring about this product's success. So, for the first time in well over a decade, I decided to open my mind to the idea of ditching Google and Chrome and trying something new.

The old adage of "If you're not paying for the product then the product is you" was a great quip in the early 2000s when I first heard it, and almost everything about the way the internet has evolved since then reinforces it for me. It's refreshing to try to consciously take a step out of that world and see what else is out there.

It's only been a week, but so far... I might really like it? I love the clever twists like how adding a question mark at the end of your search query invokes their AI assistant, which is kind of like how Google's AI suggestions appear above the search results. There are no ads, of course.

There are thoughtful filters you can toggle if you want to move from searching the entirety of "the web" to just segments of their index—a mixture of topics like Programming or Recipes or sources like PDF or Fediverse Forums. It's thoughtful and clever, and their endearingly branded "Small Web" portal gives me nostalgic StumbleUpon vibes.

I'm actually somewhat more enamored with Orion than Kagi at the moment. It's fast, the memory footprint is low, all the built-in anti-tracking and blocking features are baked in. They've put a lot of time into supporting any and all Chrome Extensions as well as they can, which is pretty wild.

All-in-all, similar to Kagi, there are just lots of little thoughtful touches sprinkled all over the app. It's fine as a "set it and forget it" kind of browser, but also has lots of power-user features that are easy to find. For example, I switched my user agent to Safari iPhone to trick the wifi portal on the plane to think it's my phone so I could take advantage of the free wifi my T-Mobile plan gets me. Can you do that on other browsers? Yeah, but even with Chrome and Safari I have to go through at least one more click to make it happen. This was evident and elegant out of the box.

Gopher

Apropos of nothing, I decided to setup a Gopher site:

If you don't have a browser that knows what to do with that link (Orion will not help you here) I'd recommend Lagrange, Gophie or Bombadillo if you're more of a TUI person.

The saga of how I setup that site I will leave for a future post.

Happy New Year to anyone reading! May the good things be more and the harder things easier for you all in 2025.