The second hit links to a man page of scp. It is a formal description of the syntax, not what I was looking for... I'd rather have a short intro and a few examples of typical usage instead, am I being pedantic? If i wanted a formal description i would google 'scp cli', 'scp options' or even 'man scp'. Also, on a tangent, to be honest -- I find searching simply for 'scp' not a very clever approach. How did Marginalia guess it would be the cli tool and not one of the other acronyms?

Yeah that's not the sort of search engine this is. If you search for SCP, it will show you documents where that term is relevant, using domain ranking as a tiebreaker. It's quite intentionally not trying to read your mind.

I think it showed the man page first because that domain is highly ranked.