You may be looking for one of the following things 🔗 Search Engine 🔗 Encyclopedia (not mobile-friendly!) 🔗 Website Explorerimproved 🔗 Similar Website Finder 🔗 Server Status My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of…
Visit marginalia.nu → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2023 – Jul 2026
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I’m working on Marginalia Search full time. I left the office for the last time today, and it’s the strangest feeling. I’ve quit jobs, taken time off work, been laid off, but this is different from any of those things. This is deliberate. There’s a note of relief. I’ve essentially been working two pretty demanding…
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d…
This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN…
So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s been…
This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrates how the…
There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion. It is an unfortunate…
You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn. In the long term, learning new things is fun and makes life richer in ways you can’t even imagine, and it’s a time investment that will pay…
The search engine has recently gained the ability to index the PDF file format. The change will deploy over a few months. Extracting text information from PDFs is a significantly bigger challenge than it might seem. The crux of the problem is that the file format isn’t a text format at all, but a graphical format. It…
It’s been three years since the inception of Marginalia Search, then a dinky experiment to find where the heck the cool Internet has gone, now my full time job. While there’s always things that can be improved, it’s fair to say the search engine has never worked as well as it does right now. A great number of…
This is a very brief post announcing a fascinating discovery. It appears to be possible to use the cosine similarity approach powering explore2.marginalia.nu as a substitute for the link graph in an eigenvector-based ranking algorithm (i.e. PageRank). The original PageRank algorithm can be conceptualized as a…
The project has been haunted by a mysterious bug since sometime February. It relates to the code that constructs the index, particularly the code that merges partial indices. In short the search engine constucts the reverse index through successive merging of smaller indices, which reduces the overall memory…
Marginalia Search now properly supports phrase matching. This not only permits a more robust implementation of quoted search queries, but also helps promote results where the search terms occur in the document exactly in the same order as they do in the query. This is a write-up about implementing this change. This is…
One of the big ambitions for the search engine this year has been to enable searching in more languages than English, and a pilot project for this has just been completed, allowing experimental support for German, French and Swedish. These changes are now live for testing, but with an extremely small corpus of…
The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read…
I’m happy to announce that the generous people at FUTO have granted the project $15,000 with no strings attached to help the search engine out with some more server power. FUTO is a young Austin, TX-based organization “dedicated to developing, both through in-house engineering and investment, technologies that…
The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked…
So the search engine is moving to a new server soon, thanks to the generous grant mentioned recently. If you visit search.marginalia.nu now, it may or may not use the old or new server. It’ll be like this for a while, since I need them both for testing and maintenance type work. I’ll also apologize if this post is a…
As some of the work planned for Marginalia Search this year has been progressing a bit faster than anticipated, there was time to implement an unplanned change. This post details the implementation of a system for detecting when servers are online, to avoid serving dead links and improve data quality, and for…
… optional, that is. I’ve been working on an NSFW filter for Marginalia Search, as that is something some people have asked for, primarily API consumers. The search engine has had some domain based filtering for a while, based on the UT1 lists, but that isn’t a very comprehensive approach. We’ll land on a single…