The search engine index has grown quite considerably the last few weeks. It’s actually surpassed 50 million documents, which is quite some milestone. In February it was sitting at 27-28 million or so. About 80% of this is side-loading all of stackoverflow and stackexchange, and part of it is additional crawling. The...

Note: This is satirical in nature. Slight CW if you are at a point in life where “Office Space” has unveiled itself as a disturbing existential horror movie. This taps into that the same darkness. A tale of six brave Internet pioneers. Senior Business Founder / Senior CEO – Zach Senior Tech Lead / Senior Architect /...

Let’s define a simple mathematical function, the function will perform integer factoring. It will take an integer, and return two integers, the product of which is the first integer. F(int32 n) = (int32 A, int32 B) so that A*B = n This is fairly straight forward, mathematical, objective. Let’s examine some answers...

I’ve caught some bug and don’t have the energy to write more than a brief note. I want to commemorate the fact that work on the Marginalia search engine started one year ago. The first commit was on February 26th 2021, and contained a sketch for a website crawler and some data models. In many ways, the paint is...

In a near future, a team of desktop computer designers are looking at the latest telemetry and updating the schematics of the hardware-as-a-service self-assembling nanohardware. Steve: “Hmm, they don’t seem to be using the power button very often.” Bob: “Compared to the other buttons, it’s only used 0.1% of the...

Not what I had intended to do this Saturday, but a hard drive failed on the server this morning, or at least so it seemed. MariaDB server went down, dmesg was full of error messages for the nvme drive it’s running off. That’s a pretty important drive. The drive itself may actually be okay, the working hypothesis is...

Black hat SEO is endlessly fascinating phenomenon to study. This post is about some tactics they use to make their sites rank higher. The goal of blackhat SEO is to boost the search engine ranking of a page nobody particularly wants to see, usually ePharma, escort services, online casinos, shitcoins, hotel bookings;...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how difficult it has become to discover quality content on the Internet, not because it isn’t there, but because the signal to noise ratio is really bad, and most venues of discovery don’t seem to be able to handle it. Recommendation algorithms seem to work almost too well, to the...

It’s been a productive several weeks. I’ve got the feature pulling updates from RSS working, as mentioned earlier. I’ve spent the last weeks designing the search engine’s web design, and did the MEMEX too for good measure. It needed to be done as the blog theme that previously made the foundation for the design off...

A person might think I’m illusive, writing and working under a pseudonym. It’s not that I’m hiding, if you send me an email, I’ll respond to you with an email address containing a decent chunk of my real name. It’s not out of shame I wear clothes. Besides bringing utility, marginalia.nu is an experiment, a bit of an...

As is often the case these dark winter seasons, I’ve fallen into a bit of a funk. Inspiration it seems is as rare as sunlight, and sunlight is scarce indeed in the winters of the north. I do know what is missing, novelty. I’ve fallen into consuming “content”. Infinite scroll is the torture rack of the spirit. What...

This entry is about a few problems the search engine has been struggling with lately, and how I’ve been attempting to remedy them. Before the article starts, I wanted to share an amusing new thing in the world of Internet spam. For a while, people have been adding things like “reddit” to the end of their Google...