God Bless Marginalia Search

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God bless Marginalia Search. It's an search engine that is not too old and doesn't have as large an index as the big boys. It was the side project of some Swede operating as a subdomain of their blog. But over time they got some EU government grants and now the search engine has gotten a cosmetic upgrade but the overall delivery is the same: It's a search engine that gives you precisely what you search for, nothing more nothing less.

It won't crowd your screen with hallucinatory bulldreck. It won't fill your search with widgets. It won't try to second guess your searches or fill you with ads or scrape your data or do anything outside of give you exactly what you asked for, nothing more nothing less.

It's a breath of fresh air compared to Google, bing, and even DuckDuckgo. Consider the following image I yoinked from this article:

For context, left to right the search queries were:

download youtube videos
ad blocker
download firefox
Why do wider tires have better grip?
Why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?
vancouver snow forecast winter 2023

As you can see Marginalia does real well with the search queries that are written like search queries, traditional ones. It fumbles on queries written like questions addressing another human, but then again the other engines are kinda bad at that rubbish too.

There's something refreshing about a search engine that gives me only what I ask for, nothing more nothing less. If I get naught, it's my own darn fault and I should refine the search. Of course its limited index can at times be a problem. You can help though. If you got sites you think should be in marginalia try filling in to the search field: site:<url>. Marginalia will return the page's info if it has any and if it's not in the index it'll give you a button to add it to the index. It'll crawl that URL next time it runs.

At times it can fall short when it's smaller directory of sites is a hindrance. I usually supplement my searches. I'll use duckduckgo as my opening salvo if that doesn't work I'll try google and marginalia. Between the various engines used something will ping properly. Often times it's marginalia finding those sites that fell between the cracks that I need. You too ought ti let marginalia into your heart and life and give it a few searches whenever the big boys aren't giving you leeway in the direction you want to go, especially when you want to escape that walled garden of an internet that is 4 websites on your cellphone.

Now for extra happy bonus fun points, see that "explore" button on the top bar? Press it. It'll be like unleading the floodgates of Geocities upon your screen, except it's not geocities, it's various people's garage band websites. I found a few interesting things. Like a weird browser with a unique engine called "Pale Moon" that doesn't steal your data and is set up to be limited on how much system resources it can hog up. This means sites like fandom wiki can't grind your computer to a screeching halt. The browser will get sluggish in such places, but your PC won't. And then there's "Thunix" which will hand out a SSH bash shell where you can set up your own webpage or gopher (wut?!). You also get a ~ website under thunix because of course you do. The guy ascribes to the "hacker ethic" so make of it what you will. It is one of the weirder more bohemian things on the web though.