"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
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@Devonkiwi @eliasulrich The online equivalent of sending the boys round to break the windows and intimidate the customers of a competitor.
@rupert @Devonkiwi @eliasulrich I was just going to say...
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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."
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@woe2you @miramarmike @daveybot @eliasulrich I remember having to tell google about my blog existing. Back when I started it. So kinda seems normal that you'd need to do that again for a search engine that starts from scratch
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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 Qwant and Ecosia are building their own index too. https://www.eu-searchperspective.com/
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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 Oh, boy. I like. I like.
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@mkalmes @eliasulrich yeah uruky is using that as one index source
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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 use it quite a bit !
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@mkalmes @eliasulrich yeah uruky is using that as one index source
@hukl
Uh, good to know. Thanks for letting me know. -
"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 love
https://marginalia-search.com/
It still finds lots of fandom sites and blogs that are actually readable! Esp. in the niche topics that get buried elsewhere.
Heh, it even found my ancient fanfics along with my most recent research paper.
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#search #fanfic -
@eliasulrich Why won't they let us have nice things?
"The search engine is currently under being hit so aggressively by bots it's interfering with the ability to serve regular search traffic. Emergency anti-scraping measures are enabled. Sorry about the inconvenience."@Devonkiwi
This might as well be the link going around on various Mastodon servers and people clicking on it. Sometimes drivers *are* the traffic themselves
@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 this is great! Thanks!
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@woe2you @miramarmike @daveybot @eliasulrich I remember having to tell google about my blog existing. Back when I started it. So kinda seems normal that you'd need to do that again for a search engine that starts from scratch
@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.
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@Devonkiwi
This might as well be the link going around on various Mastodon servers and people clicking on it. Sometimes drivers *are* the traffic themselves
@eliasulrich -
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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 love this so, so much. I searched for my own name and found writing of mine from 20 years ago and going down memory lane.
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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."
And it runs on an old UltraSPARC 2 in his hall closet and it runs Solaris 8.
Please make this last bit be true.
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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 this is really kind of interesting. Who knew, there was an actual internet out there, if only we cared to look. This makes it much easier.
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T tanyakaroli@expressional.social shared this topic
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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 swear i cried.
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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."
With just my name, that is fairly common, I was the third entry, about a music award.
Adding my profession didn't lead me to my research and publications but to a snarky piece that references one of my MTIC papers and misrepresents part of our analysis. -
@64bithero @eliasulrich If it uses Google and an LLM it's part of the problem and not solving anything.
@Rhube @eliasulrich Developing your own crawler can be time consuming and expensive. Bing which (ddg and many others use) is far worse.
Using Google to pull data and then using logic to sort through it isn’t in itself a problem. Heck most SearXng instances I run into still use a Google crawler.
Using an LLM to parse through tons of data can be effective. It’s all about how it’s trained. Websites can be all over the place. Trying to manually code to account for it all will leave huge gaps imo
Overall I’ve been impressed with much of its search results. Plus the code is open source.
