Gemini and Gopher Protocol Websites Support

johnmahlon

On the small web, there are alternative protocols to HTTP called Gopher (an old one) and Gemini (a new one). If Kagi could somehow index gopher and gemini posts, that would be insanely cool and I think it would attract a lot of like-minded folks toward this product. On top of that, if the Small Web web-ring (at the bottom of the page) could display these protocols then an even smaller version of the web could be accessed via Kagi.

Vlad

johnmahlon Indexing content is not that hard, but most browsers do not support gemini so if we surfaced these results most people would be confused.

warpspin

While it would be cool if Gemini/Gopher were more accessible, it would probably involve setting up a proxy on Kagi's site first for displaying the results - search results make no sense if all you get is an error message about an unknown protocol, when trying to open them, and might even be a net negative for Kagi as their search results appear buggy then.

Same for Small Web. From what I gathered, Small Web is mainly a side project and @Vlad would rather prefer if people submitted patches themselves: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/

Maybe ask on Github whether they'd accept a Gemini/Gopher proxy patch for Smallweb first?

johnmahlon

warpspin Vlad

You both make really good points. Here's an updated proposal:

Kagi contains a setting that allows including gemini/gopher protocols in results (maybe for just Small Web lens?). This could be defaulted to off.
If that setting is on, a secondary setting for handling those protocols:
a. Open in Kagi Small Web (which would require that to handle those protocols)
b. Open in the users own browser

I have attempted opening both gopher and gemini articles just now in Arc browser and Firefox and both give me a dialog asking if I'd like to open them in Lagrange (a gopher/gemini browser I have installed). I'm using macOS.