"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich I used to try to do that thing where you put two words into Google trying to get zero results. Managed it one time! This makes me nostalgic for those times
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@eliasulrich yet another example of a good project being put to an early grave due to engineer inability to name things.
@wraptile >posting this on “Mastodon”
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
I tried it out with the title of one of my books "enchanted grove" and it came up with this -- not bad:
https://www.meetnewbooks.com/new-exciting-book/1232
#marginalia #searchengine -
"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich great idea but not there yet
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich Heh, went to the "explore" page, and @glasnt was the first in the list!
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Cool! Searching for my name was fun: “Stephen Bannasch”. It helps that my name is unusual.
@stepheneb @eliasulrich my name, Paul Masson, is always swamped by the cheap brandy company. Still is in this search engine, so not impressed.
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@joepie91 @miramarmike @eliasulrich
Yeah I'd really like to see an ecosystem of independent search and discovery systems working together to formulate an alternative to Google, much more so than being a one stop shop Google replacement. That seems like a healthier future for the web if nothing else.
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@eliasulrich I just tried a search on Marginalia and DDG’s NoAI. The page is a WordPress blog. The Marginalia search found the page at index=20. DDG didn’t find the page after index=150. Looks like I’ll be searching using Marginalia before wasting my time on DDG’s “search”, which is Bing’s database.
@jaypeach53
The focus seems to be on that type of content, so unsurprising? And a good indicator.
@eliasulrich -
@eliasulrich Is it good, is it bad? Is it vibe coded, is it a Honeypot? I don't know.
What I do know is I searched for 'photography', then got stuck for 20 minutes on three pages from the top results that were all free of ads, dickovers and affiliate links, and they all smelled distinctly of human generated content.
️@leadinglines
I guess @marginalia should rename it to RHG, for rabbit hole generator.
@eliasulrich -
Pulled up an article about me from when I started writing a column for a computer magazine in 1998
@darwinwoodka
The Internet never forgets.
@allpurposemat @eliasulrich -
"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich owner of this is borderline for weird little guy status fyi
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich@hachyderm.io I'm a bit confused, the webpage, says "Simple technology, no AI", but the code has references to ollama, and huggingface (that a quick look). Do you know anything about what's going on there?
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@Devonkiwi
To be fair, some of those bots could be the fedi hug of death as every mastodon (and forks) instance loads a preview of the page to accompany this now-viral toot?
@eliasulrich@dheadshot not in this case; I mean it might have contributed but the anti-bot measures have been up for a while
On a different note, we do need a "fedi hug of death" emoji!
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@TjenWellens @woe2you @miramarmike @daveybot @eliasulrich When ChatGPT first came out, I asked it about myself and learned a lot of good stuff, including that I've never been a writer (coming as a shock to HuffPost, The Guardian, etc.) but that I *am* on faculty at the local law school (shocking the law school but pleasing my mother no end!). So I guess we're confronted with the choice between search engines that don't know we're alive and search engines that make up imaginary lives for us.
@msbellows @TjenWellens @woe2you @miramarmike @daveybot @eliasulrich Lucky you. ChatGPT told me which year I had died.
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@msbellows @TjenWellens @woe2you @miramarmike @daveybot @eliasulrich Lucky you. ChatGPT told me which year I had died.
@mansr @msbellows @TjenWellens @miramarmike @daveybot @eliasulrich Congrats on your resurrection.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich@hachyderm.io I've discovered so much cool stuff like this since joining the Fediverse, this is amazing! Feels like I time traveled back to the late 90s/early 2000s before the internet went ga-ga for monetization
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich Interesting but the weighting of the search results might need some work still. E.g. if I search for “CSS margin-left” I get an ancient niche Stack Overflow question with merely three upvotes, I get some tutorials, jQuery and Typo3 bug reports, a CSS test from 2002, web platform documentation discontinued a decade ago etc. W3C finally comes up in position 17 but it isn’t really the relevant standard. MDN doesn’t come up in the first ten pages. I have to add “MDN” to the search query explicitly, and then it’s still the third result.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich
So cool!
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@msbellows @TjenWellens @woe2you @miramarmike @daveybot @eliasulrich Lucky you. ChatGPT told me which year I had died.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
own index over reranked Bing is the part worth checking empirically, most self hosted engines that claim independence turn out to just filter the same crawl. has anyone logged the explore mode over a week to see if the corpus actually rotates or if its the same non commercial pages resurfacing
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