Jan 28, 2025 20:00:00

Marginalia Search: A search engine that prioritizes non-profit content

There is a huge amount of content on the Internet, both commercial and non-commercial. Sweden-based software engineer

Viktor Lofgren is developing an open source search engine called Marginalia Search that prioritizes non-commercial content.

Marginalia Search Engine - Marginalia Search
https://marginalia-search.com/

To use Marginalia Search, visit the page above.

Enter the word you want to search in the search box and click 'Search'. In this case, I entered 'image editor app'.

The search results look like this. The search results look like this. Commercial apps such as Photoshop are not displayed at the top, but derivative tools of the open source image editing app 'Gimp' and Q&A sites about the development of image editing apps are displayed at the top. In the lower right corner of each search result, 'Tracking' indicating that the visitor is tracked, 'JS' indicating that JavaScript is used, 'Cookies' indicating that cookies are used, and 'Has Ads' indicating that advertisements are included are clearly stated.

Marginalia Search allows you to search for various criteria, such as blogs and academic purposes. If you want to display only sites that do not contain JavaScript or advertisements, click 'Remove Javascript' or 'Reduce Adtech' in the 'Advanced Settings' column on the left.

Then, sites that fit the criteria were displayed. This allows you to view only non-commercial sites and content.

'There are many valuable websites out there, but many of them are obscure and disappearing. There's no point in trying to make the web a better place if no one can find what you do,' said Lofgren. 'Web search has traditionally been difficult to monetize, so many search engines have gone the route of introducing advertising, which has had a negative impact on search results,' he said, revealing that Marginalia Search was born as a search engine to maintain non-commercial content. Lofgren also

said , 'Marginalia Search is not trying to replace Bing or Google.'

'The project is currently running about $200 a month in expenses,' Lofgren said. 'Our goal is to continue to accept donations and grants to continue development and to do commercial API deals with other search engines to provide greater value to our users.'

The source code for Marginalia Search is available on GitHub.

GitHub - MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch: Internet search engine for text-oriented websites. Indexing the small, old and weird web.
https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch