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Language Support for Marginalia Search

(www.marginalia.nu)
176 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 06:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.325s | source
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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. marginalia_nu ◴[22 Oct 25 13:58 UTC] No.45669271[source]▶
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...