"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 Ran my own Marginalia-style search once — the honest truth is it's not a Google alternative, it's a bookmark. Good for the 40 pages you love, useless for anything new. What I actually missed wasn't another engine, it was the discoverability Marginalia gives a page that would otherwise be unread by anyone. That's the real ask: make small sites findable, don't try to beat Google.
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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 Nice, works for Workshopshed
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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."
Cool! Searching for my name was fun: “Stephen Bannasch”. It helps that my name is unusual.
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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 Also works great with #SearXNG.
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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 Looking good but. I searched for my name and I found some obscure forums I was on but not my web site (yet..) Still this is exactly what we need.
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@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
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 -
"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 beautiful name for it -
@joepie91 @Kyebr @miramarmike @eliasulrich
EU funding is kinda all over the map, but I've gotten some of it at least. There's generally a problem with a lot of big talkers and not a lot of actual doers in this space. Actually having something to show has made finding funding surprisingly easy.
@marginalia words to pay the bills by 🤌
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@eliasulrich not very good though, hopefully it gets better.
I did a search for my name as I have had a blog for over 20 years, didn't come up.
Mine came up right away; just searched for my name.
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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 Thanks for this link, already tried out - wonderful, you really get text heavy stuff
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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 used Marginalia Search to look up big butts, and I cannot lie, I like that the first result is a Wikipedia entry on Big Butt Mountain, and the second entry was a blog page about Sir-Mix-Alot's history with the song and the IRS.
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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
