DuckDuckGo has a lite version of their site. It can be tried out here. In the past I've found this frontend to be useful when using a text-based browser (e.g. w3m, lynx, eww, etc...), or on a low powered device. It would be really great if Kagi could implement a similar frontend.
Some requirements I can suggest:
- Two pages: Search page and results page. There should be a lite frontend for both.
- No JS, scripting, or dynamic behavior at all. Both the search page and results page should be static.
- Minimal HTML/CSS. We want to reduce network traffic and rendering as much as possible
- No/minimal images. Although most text-based browsers support rendering plain images, they often look janky so best just to stick to text. ASCII art works well!
- Functioning login page for text-based browsers (the current page does not seem to work with eww or w3m)
- Separate URL for the lite frontend, so that switching to it is simply setting your search engine URL
- All features work well on w3m, lynx, and eww. To my knowledge this covers almost all text-browser use cases today.
Nice to haves:
- Lite page for tweaking user settings that works in a text-based browser
- Option to further bias "Blast from the Past" results which would render nicely in text browsers.
- ASCII art logo on the search page
I personally find text-based browsers useful when I'm working. They allow me to read online documentation in a distraction-free way that keeps my ADHD brain on task. Another benefit of text-based browsers is that I can tweak the font face and size to match the rest of my environment, and perform word wrapping to make things easier to read than if I were rendering the full site.
The lite frontend would also be useful for searching on low powered devices such as old phones, retro computers, or embedded SOCs. These setups would pair well with the "Blast from the Past" feature I imagine.
