"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
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@daveybot @eliasulrich I'm the only person in the world with that name, can't be that hard surely
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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 yet another example of a good project being put to an early grave due to engineer inability to name things.
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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.
@miramarmike @eliasulrich I think "to fight google" is maybe not the ideal framing here tbh, it's not really trying to be a google alternative as far as I know
in that rather than trying to index everything in existence, its goal is to make *information* searchable, and so the important thing is how much information it covers rather than how many sites
and from that perspective, I would expect it to find an information subject, but not a specific name or person -
"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 it works, it really works. My blog name comes out as the second hit. It’s not even indexed by Google (you can find it in bing if you get a bit more specific with the search).
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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 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.
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@miramarmike @eliasulrich I think "to fight google" is maybe not the ideal framing here tbh, it's not really trying to be a google alternative as far as I know
in that rather than trying to index everything in existence, its goal is to make *information* searchable, and so the important thing is how much information it covers rather than how many sites
and from that perspective, I would expect it to find an information subject, but not a specific name or person@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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"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 like it!
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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.
@marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich I just so happen to be working on that as well with seekseek, which is to be a specialized search engine (well, more like a collection of them) on one hand, but also a sort of 'construction kit' to make it easy for other people to build their own such search engines on the other
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@marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich I just so happen to be working on that as well with seekseek, which is to be a specialized search engine (well, more like a collection of them) on one hand, but also a sort of 'construction kit' to make it easy for other people to build their own such search engines on the other
@marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich (it started as *just* a collection of search engines but I eventually came to the conclusion that the 'construction kit' bit is probably the more important part)
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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
It certainly passes my litmus tests of searching:
* solubility gallium
* lava viscosityI don't know how generally useful this benchmark is for anyone else, but I was happy with the results.
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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.
@marginalia @joepie91 @miramarmike @eliasulrich Actually there's an EU initiative for exactly this. It has multiple crawlers (Quant is one of them) who aggregate it as one.
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@eliasulrich oh man, I could really get into using this one
Kagi.com is apparently good too, but uses google’s search index so need subscription
@gimulnautti @eliasulrich ... and is an AI company in disguise
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@marginalia @joepie91 @miramarmike @eliasulrich Actually there's an EU initiative for exactly this. It has multiple crawlers (Quant is one of them) who aggregate it as one.
@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich which initiative is this? I've generally been pretty unhappy with how a lot of EU funding goes to for-profit startup-y things with all the same bad incentives, so I'm curious to see if there's something different about this one
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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 May I recommend Neosearch.org it’s a small project that uses Google And an LLM. But the results are well sorted , concise and as far as I can see 0 tracking or ads.
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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 @eliasulrich The online equivalent of sending the boys round to break the windows and intimidate the customers of a competitor.
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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 @eliasulrich
Thank you! -
@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich which initiative is this? I've generally been pretty unhappy with how a lot of EU funding goes to for-profit startup-y things with all the same bad incentives, so I'm curious to see if there's something different about this one
@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.
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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 sharing this. It's cool and old school. Like the early web when you wanted to learn more about things and not just buy 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."
@eliasulrich this is actually awesome, it just saved me like an hour of work on my first try
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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."
It looks great, going to start using it today
