{"slug": "marginalia-search", "name": "Marginalia Search", "category": "search", "category_name": "Search", "description": "Independent open-source search engine that favors small, non-commercial websites and personal blogs.", "recommenders": 9, "commenters": 11, "warners": 0, "score": 8.3, "rising": -0.62, "first": "2025-11-01", "latest": "2026-08-11", "why": "HN commenters recommend it for surfacing blogs and small, non-commercial sites made by real people, and for finding obscure pages other engines don't show.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 12, "neutral": 1, "compare": 1, "warn": 0}, "spark": [3, 0, 2, 1, 2, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["Small web discovery", "Obscure finds"], "caveat": "Smaller index", "short_quote": "a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.", "icon": true, "domain": "marginalia-search.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://marginalia-search.com/", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Marginalia Search", "Marginalia"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters recommend it for surfacing blogs and small, non-commercial sites made by real people", "cites": [{"id": 758441712, "item_id": 47402607, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402607", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it really is a breath of fresh air.", "excerpt": "I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, w", "context": "", "use_case": "finding real blogs and writings", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}, {"id": 752411312, "item_id": 47025707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025707", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-02-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet.", "excerpt": "If anyone wants the surreal experience of seeing blogs and websites made by real humans they should check out https://marginalia-search.com It's far from perfect but it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet. It recently got some NLNet funding and I hope to see it flourish - to my knowledge there aren't any other projects trying to claw back control of the internet towards the common", "context": "", "use_case": "finding human-made websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Internet Increasingly Becoming Unarchivable"}, {"id": 747037248, "item_id": 46689828, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689828", "by": "Antibabelic", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content.", "excerpt": "Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content. It may not be a perfect alternative to Google\u2014the index is much smaller\u2014but it is much \"cleaner\".", "context": "", "use_case": "search without SEO content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is there a search engine that blocks SEO / AI content?"}, {"id": 758533136, "item_id": 47408321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408321", "by": "unsungNovelty", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.", "excerpt": "Hey!!!!! That is my website! To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts. I also wrote something similar to OP - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024", "context": "personal website owner", "use_case": "finding small web content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}]}, {"text": ", and for finding obscure pages other engines don't show.", "cites": [{"id": 786502738, "item_id": 49156421, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156421", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-08-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface.", "excerpt": "If you don't mind paying and someone else having control over your search experience, Kagi is an option. Urkey (sp?) is another new alternative. If you just want a free search engine, Brave is probably the best index. Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface. But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's easy to build your own metasearch engine and search several engines at o", "context": "", "use_case": "finding obscure pages", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?"}, {"id": 788088225, "item_id": 49255514, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255514", "by": "sph", "date": "2026-08-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Sometimes I use Marginalia's", "excerpt": "I love Kagi, I am a paid user since day 1, but SmallWeb is a collection of English-speaking tech blogs, it cannot even begin to compete in diversity with the GeoCities era of the web. (to be fair: I've had Kagi employees telling me their dataset is growing larger and more diverse every day, so worth keeping an eye on it) Sometimes I use Marginalia's \"Vintage Web\" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs a", "context": "", "use_case": "niche topic search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse"}]}, {"text": " The most common caveat is that its index is much smaller than Google's", "cites": [{"id": 747037248, "item_id": 46689828, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689828", "by": "Antibabelic", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content.", "excerpt": "Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content. It may not be a perfect alternative to Google\u2014the index is much smaller\u2014but it is much \"cleaner\".", "context": "", "use_case": "search without SEO content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is there a search engine that blocks SEO / AI content?"}]}, {"text": ", and results for specific queries can be only loosely related.", "cites": [{"id": 755723569, "item_id": 47232723, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232723", "by": "lucasluitjes", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results", "excerpt": "I've been annoyed with Google search quality lately and was wondering how the others fared on this specific issue. Turns out, mostly not much better. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or r", "context": "", "use_case": "search for an open source project", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Small web discovery", "summary": "Surfaces blogs, IndieWeb and non-commercial sites written by real people instead of SEO content.", "quotes": [{"id": 758441712, "item_id": 47402607, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402607", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it really is a breath of fresh air.", "excerpt": "I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, w", "context": "", "use_case": "finding real blogs and writings", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}, {"id": 752411312, "item_id": 47025707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025707", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-02-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet.", "excerpt": "If anyone wants the surreal experience of seeing blogs and websites made by real humans they should check out https://marginalia-search.com It's far from perfect but it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet. It recently got some NLNet funding and I hope to see it flourish - to my knowledge there aren't any other projects trying to claw back control of the internet towards the common", "context": "", "use_case": "finding human-made websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Internet Increasingly Becoming Unarchivable"}, {"id": 758533136, "item_id": 47408321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408321", "by": "unsungNovelty", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.", "excerpt": "Hey!!!!! That is my website! To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts. I also wrote something similar to OP - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024", "context": "personal website owner", "use_case": "finding small web content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}]}, {"label": "Obscure finds", "summary": "Finds niche and obscure pages, including old personal sites, that other engines miss.", "quotes": [{"id": 786502738, "item_id": 49156421, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156421", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-08-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface.", "excerpt": "If you don't mind paying and someone else having control over your search experience, Kagi is an option. Urkey (sp?) is another new alternative. If you just want a free search engine, Brave is probably the best index. Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface. But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's easy to build your own metasearch engine and search several engines at o", "context": "", "use_case": "finding obscure pages", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?"}, {"id": 788088225, "item_id": 49255514, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255514", "by": "sph", "date": "2026-08-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Sometimes I use Marginalia's", "excerpt": "I love Kagi, I am a paid user since day 1, but SmallWeb is a collection of English-speaking tech blogs, it cannot even begin to compete in diversity with the GeoCities era of the web. (to be fair: I've had Kagi employees telling me their dataset is growing larger and more diverse every day, so worth keeping an eye on it) Sometimes I use Marginalia's \"Vintage Web\" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs a", "context": "", "use_case": "niche topic search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse"}, {"id": 755723569, "item_id": 47232723, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232723", "by": "lucasluitjes", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results", "excerpt": "I've been annoyed with Google search quality lately and was wondering how the others fared on this specific issue. Turns out, mostly not much better. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or r", "context": "", "use_case": "search for an open source project", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"}]}, {"label": "Open source", "summary": "The engine is open source, and its code is on GitHub for others to reuse.", "quotes": [{"id": 758533136, "item_id": 47408321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408321", "by": "unsungNovelty", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.", "excerpt": "Hey!!!!! That is my website! To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts. I also wrote something similar to OP - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024", "context": "personal website owner", "use_case": "finding small web content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}, {"id": 779405280, "item_id": 48712830, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712830", "by": "Tiberium", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine", "excerpt": "The search engine does indeed seem to be fully custom - the results for niche topics are quite bad, but that at least means it's not a Bing frontend, so it's forgivable. Although I wonder why the authors decided to go 100% custom instead of (partially?) reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine. On an unrelated note: why do some people use LLMs to write all the text in t", "context": "", "use_case": "core search engine", "switched_from": "", "story": "Xonaly \u2013 Canada's Independent Search Engine"}]}, {"label": "Public documentation", "summary": "The project documents publicly how it built its search engine.", "quotes": [{"id": 747408432, "item_id": 46713027, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46713027", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I especially appreciate Marginalia for publicly documenting as much about building a search engine as they have", "excerpt": "+1 so much for this. I have been doing the same, an SQLite database of my \"own personal internet\" of the sites I actually need. I use it as a tiny supplementary index for a metasearch engine I built for myself - which I actually did to replace Kagi. Building a metasearch engine is not hard to do (especially with AI now). It's so liberating when you control the ranking algorithm, and can supplement what the big engine", "context": "built personal metasearch engine", "use_case": "search results and documentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi"}]}, {"label": "Redesigned site", "summary": "One user prefers the redesigned site to the old version.", "quotes": [{"id": 758615248, "item_id": 47413453, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413453", "by": "unsungNovelty", "date": "2026-03-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's a very nice site now. I prefer it better than old version.", "excerpt": "Couple of things. 1. No. It's not javascript only. https://old-search.marginalia.nu/ is still available. It is also mentioned in https://about.marginalia-search.com/article/redesign/ as gonna be there for a very long time. 2. I don't think just because it uses javascript make it bad. It's a very nice site now. I prefer it better than old version. My website doesn't use JS for any functionality yet. But I've never sai", "context": "", "use_case": "small web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Smaller index", "summary": "The index is much smaller than Google's, so it is not a full replacement.", "quotes": [{"id": 747037248, "item_id": 46689828, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689828", "by": "Antibabelic", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content.", "excerpt": "Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content. It may not be a perfect alternative to Google\u2014the index is much smaller\u2014but it is much \"cleaner\".", "context": "", "use_case": "search without SEO content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is there a search engine that blocks SEO / AI content?"}, {"id": 752411312, "item_id": 47025707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025707", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-02-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet.", "excerpt": "If anyone wants the surreal experience of seeing blogs and websites made by real humans they should check out https://marginalia-search.com It's far from perfect but it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet. It recently got some NLNet funding and I hope to see it flourish - to my knowledge there aren't any other projects trying to claw back control of the internet towards the common", "context": "", "use_case": "finding human-made websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Internet Increasingly Becoming Unarchivable"}]}, {"label": "Off-target results", "summary": "For a specific query, it returned only tangentially related results and missed the project's GitHub repo and homepages.", "quotes": [{"id": 755723569, "item_id": 47232723, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232723", "by": "lucasluitjes", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results", "excerpt": "I've been annoyed with Google search quality lately and was wondering how the others fared on this specific issue. Turns out, mostly not much better. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or r", "context": "", "use_case": "search for an open source project", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"}]}, {"label": "Dead links", "summary": "Most results from its Vintage Web search are dead blogs and old .edu pages.", "quotes": [{"id": 788088225, "item_id": 49255514, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255514", "by": "sph", "date": "2026-08-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Sometimes I use Marginalia's", "excerpt": "I love Kagi, I am a paid user since day 1, but SmallWeb is a collection of English-speaking tech blogs, it cannot even begin to compete in diversity with the GeoCities era of the web. (to be fair: I've had Kagi employees telling me their dataset is growing larger and more diverse every day, so worth keeping an eye on it) Sometimes I use Marginalia's \"Vintage Web\" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs a", "context": "", "use_case": "niche topic search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse"}]}, {"label": "JavaScript redesign", "summary": "The new site uses JavaScript, but the old version is still available.", "quotes": [{"id": 758615248, "item_id": 47413453, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413453", "by": "unsungNovelty", "date": "2026-03-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's a very nice site now. I prefer it better than old version.", "excerpt": "Couple of things. 1. No. It's not javascript only. https://old-search.marginalia.nu/ is still available. It is also mentioned in https://about.marginalia-search.com/article/redesign/ as gonna be there for a very long time. 2. I don't think just because it uses javascript make it bad. It's a very nice site now. I prefer it better than old version. My website doesn't use JS for any functionality yet. But I've never sai", "context": "", "use_case": "small web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}]}, {"label": "Temporary funding", "summary": "One commenter says its NLNet funding is temporary.", "quotes": [{"id": 758441712, "item_id": 47402607, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402607", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it really is a breath of fresh air.", "excerpt": "I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, w", "context": "", "use_case": "finding real blogs and writings", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}]}], "who": [{"by": "unsungNovelty", "context": "personal website owner", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408321", "date": "2026-03-16"}, {"by": "SyneRyder", "context": "built personal metasearch engine", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46713027", "date": "2026-01-21"}, {"by": "z64", "context": "works on Kagi search", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710718", "date": "2026-01-21"}], "tags": ["for small-web discovery", "for IndieWeb readers", "open source", "for metasearch setups", "for niche research"], "use_cases": ["niche topic search", "finding obscure pages", "core search engine", "finding personal blogs", "small web search", "finding small web content"], "compared": [{"slug": "kagi", "name": "Kagi", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "brave", "name": "Brave", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "mojeek", "name": "Mojeek", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 788589648, "item_id": 49286853, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286853", "by": "marginalia_nu", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use for ad detection in Marginalia Search", "excerpt": "Interesting project. Website discovery is indeed in a pretty dire spot, definitely a space that needs innovation. An auto-labeled website directory isn't that silly of an idea. I have a 400 GB sqlite database with samples of rendered root document DOMs I use for ad detection in Marginalia Search I've been meaning to explore similar ideas using.", "context": "", "use_case": "ad detection", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Built a 500k-Domain Search Engine for Makers in a Weekend for $10"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401879", "title": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678", "title": "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285718", "title": "I Built a 500k-Domain Search Engine for Makers in a Weekend for $10", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250836", "title": "Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155492", "title": "Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712324", "title": "Xonaly \u2013 Canada's Independent Search Engine", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 3}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 788088225, "item_id": 49255514, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255514", "by": "sph", "date": "2026-08-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Sometimes I use Marginalia's", "excerpt": "I love Kagi, I am a paid user since day 1, but SmallWeb is a collection of English-speaking tech blogs, it cannot even begin to compete in diversity with the GeoCities era of the web. (to be fair: I've had Kagi employees telling me their dataset is growing larger and more diverse every day, so worth keeping an eye on it) Sometimes I use Marginalia's \"Vintage Web\" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs a", "context": "", "use_case": "niche topic search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse"}, {"id": 786502738, "item_id": 49156421, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156421", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-08-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface.", "excerpt": "If you don't mind paying and someone else having control over your search experience, Kagi is an option. Urkey (sp?) is another new alternative. If you just want a free search engine, Brave is probably the best index. Bonus points to Marginalia for finding the obscure things Brave doesn't surface. But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's easy to build your own metasearch engine and search several engines at o", "context": "", "use_case": "finding obscure pages", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?"}, {"id": 779405280, "item_id": 48712830, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712830", "by": "Tiberium", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine", "excerpt": "The search engine does indeed seem to be fully custom - the results for niche topics are quite bad, but that at least means it's not a Bing frontend, so it's forgivable. Although I wonder why the authors decided to go 100% custom instead of (partially?) reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine. On an unrelated note: why do some people use LLMs to write all the text in t", "context": "", "use_case": "core search engine", "switched_from": "", "story": "Xonaly \u2013 Canada's Independent Search Engine"}, {"id": 769234576, "item_id": 48077161, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077161", "by": "cosmicgadget", "date": "2026-05-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Also worth mentioning the goat:", "excerpt": "Also worth mentioning the goat: https://marginalia-search.com/ And some others to check out including blog posts about discovering blog posts on this blog post: https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html", "context": "", "use_case": "finding personal blogs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do you find good personal blogs on Google nowadays?"}, {"id": 758615248, "item_id": 47413453, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413453", "by": "unsungNovelty", "date": "2026-03-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's a very nice site now. I prefer it better than old version.", "excerpt": "Couple of things. 1. No. It's not javascript only. https://old-search.marginalia.nu/ is still available. It is also mentioned in https://about.marginalia-search.com/article/redesign/ as gonna be there for a very long time. 2. I don't think just because it uses javascript make it bad. It's a very nice site now. I prefer it better than old version. My website doesn't use JS for any functionality yet. But I've never sai", "context": "", "use_case": "small web search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}, {"id": 758533136, "item_id": 47408321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408321", "by": "unsungNovelty", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.", "excerpt": "Hey!!!!! That is my website! To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts. I also wrote something similar to OP - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024", "context": "personal website owner", "use_case": "finding small web content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}, {"id": 758441712, "item_id": 47402607, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402607", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it really is a breath of fresh air.", "excerpt": "I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, w", "context": "", "use_case": "finding real blogs and writings", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kevin Boone: The \"small web\" is bigger than you might think"}, {"id": 755723569, "item_id": 47232723, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232723", "by": "lucasluitjes", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results", "excerpt": "I've been annoyed with Google search quality lately and was wondering how the others fared on this specific issue. Turns out, mostly not much better. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or r", "context": "", "use_case": "search for an open source project", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"}, {"id": 752411312, "item_id": 47025707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025707", "by": "upboundspiral", "date": "2026-02-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet.", "excerpt": "If anyone wants the surreal experience of seeing blogs and websites made by real humans they should check out https://marginalia-search.com It's far from perfect but it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet. It recently got some NLNet funding and I hope to see it flourish - to my knowledge there aren't any other projects trying to claw back control of the internet towards the common", "context": "", "use_case": "finding human-made websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Internet Increasingly Becoming Unarchivable"}, {"id": 747408432, "item_id": 46713027, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46713027", "by": "SyneRyder", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I especially appreciate Marginalia for publicly documenting as much about building a search engine as they have", "excerpt": "+1 so much for this. I have been doing the same, an SQLite database of my \"own personal internet\" of the sites I actually need. I use it as a tiny supplementary index for a metasearch engine I built for myself - which I actually did to replace Kagi. Building a metasearch engine is not hard to do (especially with AI now). It's so liberating when you control the ranking algorithm, and can supplement what the big engine", "context": "built personal metasearch engine", "use_case": "search results and documentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi"}, {"id": 747371489, "item_id": 46710718, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710718", "by": "z64", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Marginalia data is physically consolidated into the same infra that we use for small web results in our SERP", "excerpt": "There is a practical limit that we can't cache results for too long; Search engine users are particularly sensitive to stale data, especially around current events. Without a holistic and realiable way to know when the cache ought to be invalidated, our caching is mostly focused on mitigating \"abuse\", e.g., someone / bunch of people spamming the same search in a short timespan; no sense in repeating all those upstrea", "context": "works on Kagi search", "use_case": "small web index source", "switched_from": "", "story": "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi"}, {"id": 747037248, "item_id": 46689828, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689828", "by": "Antibabelic", "date": "2026-01-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content.", "excerpt": "Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) is an indie search engine that prioritizes small websites and non-commercial content. It may not be a perfect alternative to Google\u2014the index is much smaller\u2014but it is much \"cleaner\".", "context": "", "use_case": "search without SEO content", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is there a search engine that blocks SEO / AI content?"}, {"id": 736193280, "item_id": 46012080, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012080", "by": "cosmicgadget", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Marginalia is great.", "excerpt": "Marginalia is great. Also take a look at https://outerweb.org/explore", "context": "", "use_case": "discovering personal blogs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?"}, {"id": 735244304, "item_id": 45952769, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952769", "by": "HelloUsername", "date": "2025-11-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love your https://marginalia-search.com :)", "excerpt": "I love your https://marginalia-search.com :)", "context": "", "use_case": "search engine", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building a Simple Search Engine That Works"}, {"id": 732548644, "item_id": 45784290, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784290", "by": "foobarqux", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "corfu+marginalia+vertico+embark+orderless is the standard completion stack now", "excerpt": "Don't use doom etc, just standard emacs, otherwise you won't have any understanding of what is happening and how to fix it. Here's a list of what I think is important, roughly more important to less: - corfu+marginalia+vertico+embark+orderless is the standard completion stack now - magit (maybe also see also the \"casual\" the transient front end for other modes) - avy - (fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p) ; 'Y' or 'N' inste", "context": "", "use_case": "Emacs completion", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Where to begin with \"modern\" Emacs?"}]}