"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
-
@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 🤌
-
@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.
-
"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
-
"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.
-
"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
-
@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”
-
"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
-
"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!
-
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.
-
@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.
-
@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
-
"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?
-
@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!
-
@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.
