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 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.