"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
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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.
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@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.
@64bithero @eliasulrich Yes it really fucking is a problem. It uses planet-destroying theft machines. It is the precise problem this thread is trying to address. You have completely misunderstood the aim due to your own apparent lack of ethics. Please go talk to some other hacks who are happy destroying the world.
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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 oh wow, this is actually really really good. i was expecting shitty results but the results are mostly great. the only thing about it i think is weird is that prioritizing text heavy pages means looking up the name of a website will often show a text heavy page from the website before the home page.
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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.
