Looks like a cool search engine! Hadn't heard about it before.

But the search page says "Simple technology, no AI". With this change, that is no longer true though, is it? Of course the definition of "AI" is extremely vague. Once upon a time, A-star search was considered AI after all.

This was a very meandering project, and trying to corral it into some sort of coherent narrative was a bit of an undertaking on its own. Hopefully it makes some sense.

Does marginalia_nu not use embedding models as part of search? I guess I assumed it would. If you have embeddings anyway, decision trees on the embedding vector (e.g. catboost) tend to work pretty well. Fine-tuning modernbert works even better but probably won't meet the criteria of "really fast and run well on CPUs". That said, the approach described in the article seems to work well enough and obviously provides extremely cheap inference

Have you seen many examples of websites labeling themselves, perhaps using rating meta tags (<meta name="rating" ...>)? Self-labeling seems valuable in some ways, but I don't think I've seen it catch on.

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