Marginalia Search receives second nlnet grant
9 comments
·March 25, 2025mg
marginalia_nu
(author) I think with this type of huge project, you kinda need to approach it by solving one problem at a time. It's always been good at something, though initially it was quite tricky to find that "something". Keeping at it has meant the number of queries it can adequately answer has increased fairly significantly.
Not that there isn't still stuff to be done, though at the same time, it's a very fun and rewarding project on its own. That helps. Would probably have given up (or not even started) if I didn't enjoy the problems I encounter as much as I do.
davidsojevic
The Marginalia Search project has been such a great one to follow over the years and I think Viktor is very well deserving of both the last grant and the new grant.
Following the technical journey that he has documented through the blog posts over time has been great to read and I dream about one day trying out the same thing myself at the same sort of scale that he has managed to do as a solo dev.
I'm very glad to see that he's going to be able to keep working on the project for at least the immediate future!
maelito
Couldn't find my 2 latest Website on Marginalia :/
One has millions of visits per year (nosgestesclimat.fr), the second is smaller but has a blog with lots of articles (cartes.app).
Is the engine limited to english only website ?
Edit : searching "lemonde" does not yield lemonde.fr, but the Wikipedia page "Nuclear Strike"
marginalia_nu
Yes, it's currently limited to English. That's one of the things I hope to be able to address.
maelito
Great, that explains it ! Also got a grant for Cartes.app.
I18n is on the roadmap.
aloisdg
Thank you for both website btw
timtom123
Great search engine. I use it daily via SearXNG and an API key. Maintainer is very friendly.
null
The persistence of Marginalia's creator is impressive.
I run a web search comparison site (Gnod Search) and every time I saw Marginalia, I played around with it for a while and thought "What is this for? Does anybody actually use this?" and decided against adding it to Gnod Search. Thinking this project would soon give up in the face of the giant competitors it has.
But it kept coming up over and over again :)
Then recently I was looking for blog posts about experiences with Linux on tablets. I had a hard time finding something with Google & Co. I remembered that this could be a good use-case for Marginalia. I tried it, and indeed I found some relevant posts by Linux enthusiasts.
I then immediately added it to the default search engines:
https://www.gnod.com/search/