> [...] but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is.

Would you be able to share some of your personal highlights regarding this?

I've partially kept up-to-date with the DIY, non-corporate search space (YaCY and friends). I'd love to understand a bit more behind the engineering decisions made when creating a search engine; it seems like a very hard problem to solve.

P.S. Marginalia is a very impressive piece of work, overall -- I've heard nothing but positive remarks from users on here. I've been meaning to try it for a while, but time constraints have... well, constrained, thus far.

Honestly I understand it well enough that I see it is surprisingly hard, but not enough to have good solutions...

I just tested Mariginalia and it was completely unable to lead me to a Wikipedia or imdb page when searching for "driver ryan gosling" and variations. It just listed lots of random articles.

That.. is kind of the point of this particular search engine.

> This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.

Well that makes sense, but I wanted to push against the result that the OP seems to take away from their test, which was that Marginalia seems to work well for the common user.

There's also a known bug with Wikipedia in particular, I do index it but the results are never ranked particularly high. I haven't fixed it because I don't want Wikipedia to be the #1 result for every search. Feels like most people are aware of Wikipedia and don't need help finding it.

I often do a Google search, and then go directly to the Wikipedia result. My reasoning is that during the initial search, I don't know if there's a Wikipedia page about that topic, and I might need a fallback option.

Unless it's something related to medicine; then you have to explicitly add "wiki" to the query. Some public health thing to discourage hypochondriacs I guess, but it's very annoying.

Thanks for your work!

I have a suggestion for the “About” section at the top of Marginalia’s landing page. I think it would read better like this:

> This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of [instead] of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.

Showing one thing “in favor of” another seems contradictory in this case.

I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single developer can do so well ;)

I do think that search has gotten much worse but my ability to know the magic words like “ublock origin” instead of “Adblock” and “yt-dlp” instead of “download YouTube” and phrase my search has gotten better.

We’ve all been doing prompt engineering against the Internet-wide LLM that is the spam houses.

> I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single developer can do so well ;)

As much as I enjoy the notion of somehow being a 10,000X developer, it's probably mostly that modern search is a filtering problem, and MS does filtering fairly well.

Just my feedback after trying to finally get to what it is exactly.

I tried to find marginalia on DDG, not on the first page. Google has it after some garbage. If I go to marginalia.nu I get a SSL error. search.marginalia.nu works

If i search on marginalia for duckduckgo there first link is somewhat relevant but is about the app, all the other links are related to DDG but of curious relevance.

If I search for ublacklist mentioned above, I do not see anything directly relevant.

Hmm, what's your browser? I renewed the cert today... Only thing I can think of is that it might not like a wildcard cert for the bare marginalia.nu domain.

Safari doesn't like https://marginalia.nu. Probably because *.marginalia.nu is not valid for the base domain. Add it as a Subject Alt Name

Try now?

Looks like you've fixed your bug.

Firefox android

Hmm, can't reproduce it myself, but firefox has a nasty habit of quietly "repairing" these types of misconfigurations by redirecting from one subdomain to another. I've added marginalia.nu as a SAN, should hopefully work now.

It does indeed work. Thanks for the quick fix, and I realize that there is more than a search engine here!

Hi, your encyclopedia experiment(?) is also very inspiring. I really think it works, it makes it much easier to read the articles.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. I wish I had more time to polish it up a bit. A least make the mobile experience work a bit better.

> Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.

Good. I love keyword search.

"Semantic understanding" can be so biased and ... just shady sometimes.

It's tricky though. I think a lot of people think they want raw keyword search, but what they really want is a search experience that makes intuitive sense.

If you lean too much into embeddings and so on, it's easy to get errors that don't make sense to a human being. It's extremely frustrating when you experience "I typed X, why am I getting results about Y?!"

That said, I think there's a sweet spot with some magic, where it genuinely just makes search better. But it's like perfume, if it's immediately obvious that it's there, it's probably a fair bit too much.

Keyword search leads to things like every website would put meaningless words in the meta section of their website so it would be picked by Altavista

No, if it's done right. Source: I made my own search engine