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.