Language Support for Marginalia Search

I’m a little confused by Marginalia. I looked to find out what its purpose was, but couldn’t find it. My bad, I guess, but then again I’m not a search engine. It is pretty cool for a DIY project but the results were really off, especially for searches for individuals. Like take Ezra Klein as an example. Sure there is a link to his show from castbox, a service I have never heard of, and then a bunch of anti Ezra Klein articles. Wikipedia shows up, the last link of the first page is to Abundance. But no NYT? That seems like a big problem. I thought I’d look up Daring Fireball and the only link to his site was a ways down and was to a list of links in 2008. These are just two random searches. I did others, starting with myself, and my results were similar.

Likely I am totally not understanding what this search engine is for. I see this a lot on submissions here. I find something interesting sounding but I don’t understand the context. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s confusing.

It's a one-man Search engine developed and hosted in the EU.

If you read his about page, it is basically an anti-centralization anti-ad anti-spyware attempt at websearch. It is also "The project is independent in that it has no loans, no investors looking for a payday, no strings attached anywhere to pressure it into doing anything than providing as much and as good internet search as it is capable of."

It not indexing NYT seems precisely on brand.

The point of Marginalia Search, as far as there is one, is mostly to complement the bigger search engines by providing tools to find obscure stuff that's drowned out elsewhere, mostly by offering a bunch of filters.

It's not a google replacement, and if you already know what you're looking for then it's probably not the right tool.

Maybe you're looking for mechanical keyboard discussions, then maybe a search for "mechanical keyboard" in the Blogs or Forums filters will provide results you are into.

It's also pretty good at unearthing weird stuff. Say you want to read up on Jack Parsons[3], that Jet Propulsion Lab guy who dabbled in occultism, fell in with Alistair Crowley and then got scammed out of his wealth by L Ron Hubbard, and finally blew himself up, well that is the sort of topic Marginalia Search generally excels at.

[1] https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=mechanical+keyboa...

[2] https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=mechanical+keyboa...

[3] https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=Jack+Parsons&prof...

It’s for finding results that are less common or more unlikely to appear on other engines, so your results make sense. Why would you need yet another link to an NYT article? That space is crowded. Every engine will find it.

Where it particularly shines is finding highly specific results that get buried in other search engines. Some topics (particularly topics of high commercial interest) have become impossible to research on mainstream search engines. Marginalia will actually find informative articles about these topics rather than page after page of product results and spam.

It may not be useful to you if you’re not a researcher, writer, or someone who often needs to dig deeply into subjects beyond the level of common knowledge.

It does index bits of NYT, but coverage is pretty spotty outside of their archives. They put a lot of crawler countermeasures up on their main site (which I guess is fair, they have a business to run), but author biographies are generally accessible, including Ezra's[1].

Though since the search engine doesn't really apply much in terms of domain authority, this doesn't rank very highly, the websites that talk about Ezra Klein rank higher.

[1] https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=site%3Anytimes.co...