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Thanks for shilling.

Regarding the financials, even though the second nlnet grant runs out in a few weeks, I've got enough of a war chest to work full time probably a good bit into 2029 (modulo additional inflation shocks). The operational bit is self-funding now, and it's relatively low maintenance, so if worse comes to worst I'll have to get a job (if jobs still exist in 2029, otherwise I guess I'll live in the shameful cardboard box of those who were NGMI ;-).

by boxedemp3 hours ago|

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I think that's a cool project, though I found the results to be less relevant than Google.

by janalsncm2 hours ago|

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Whether the results are less relevant or not depends massively on what you searched and whether the best results even exist in the Marginalia search index or not.

If Google is ranking small web results better than Marginalia, that’s actionable.

If the best result isn’t in the index and it should be, that’s actionable.

by marginalia_nu2 hours ago|

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Well to be fair, Marginalia is also developed by 1 guy (me), and Google has like 10K people and infinite compute they can throw at the problem. There has been definite improvements, and will be more improvements still, but Google's still got hands.

by janalsncm1 hours ago|

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Hey Marginalia, cheers. Imo fewer hands can also be an advantage.

There are no PMs breathing down your neck to inject more ads in the search results, you don’t depend on any broken internal bespoke tools that you can’t fix yourself, and you don’t need anybody’s permission to deploy a new ranking strategy if you want to.

by lich_king3 hours ago|

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> Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness.

I don't think they do that. Instead, "usefulness" is mostly synonymous with commercial intent: searching for <x> often means "I want to buy <x>".

Even for non-commercial queries, I think the sad reality is that most people subconsciously prefer LLM-generated or content-farmed stuff too. It looks more professional, has nice images (never mind that they're stock photos or AI-generated), etc. Your average student looking for an explanation of why the sky is blue is more interested in a TikTok-style short than some white-on-black or black-on-gray webpage that gives them 1990s vibes.

TL;DR: I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. It might be not what a small minority on HN wants.

by marginalia_nu2 hours ago|

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Google and most search engines optimize for what is most likely to be clicked on. This works poorly and creates a huge popularity bias at scale because it starts feeding on its own tail: What major search engines show you is after all a large contributor to what's most likely to be clicked on.

The reason Marginalia (for some queries) feels like it shows such refreshing results is that it simply does not take popularity into account.

by BrenBarn3 hours ago|

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> I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want.

There is some truth in this, but to me it's similar to saying that a drug dealer gives their customers exactly what they want. People "want" those things because Google and its ilk have conditioned them to want those things.

by sdenton42 hours ago|

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On the one hand, a search engine is not heroin... It's a pretty broken analogy.

On the other hand, we could probably convince Cory Doctorow to write a piece about how fentanyl is really about the enshitification of opiates.