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.
replyIf 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.
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.
replyHey Marginalia, cheers. Imo fewer hands can also be an advantage.
replyThere 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.