←back to thread

Language Support for Marginalia Search

(www.marginalia.nu)
176 points Bogdanp | 2 comments | 21 Oct 25 06:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.456s | source
Show context
smoghat ◴[22 Oct 25 12:50 UTC] No.45668298[source]▶
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.

replies(3): >>45669136 #>>45669271 #>>45669273 #
1. FabCH ◴[22 Oct 25 13:49 UTC] No.45669136[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>45669396 #
2. marginalia_nu ◴[22 Oct 25 14:07 UTC] No.45669396[source]▶
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...