How you engage with the world changes how you experience the world, and how the world experiences you. A snarky and cynical approach, by its default assumption that things are shit, or if they are not yet shit will inevitably turn to; such an approach will give your world a malodorous brownish tint. Granted, snark...

The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to...

As some of the work planned for Marginalia Search this year has been progressing a bit faster than anticipated, there was time to implement an unplanned change. This post details the implementation of a system for detecting when servers are online, to avoid serving dead links and improve data quality, and for...

The most recent change to the search engine is a system that profiles websites based on their rendered DOM. The goal is identifying advertisements, trackers, nuisance popovers, and similar elements. The search engine already tries to do this, but isn’t very good at it because it’s only looking at static code. It...

You wake at 05:30 in the morning, feeling somewhat groggy. Instead of the alarm clock ringing like it normally does, a cheerful hologram appears: “Hi! I’m Kyle, your new alarm clock assistant!” You get dressed as Kyle explains all of the fantastic things he is capable of. You head over to the coffee machine. “Hey...

The search engine has recently gained the ability to index the PDF file format. The change will deploy over a few months. Extracting text information from PDFs is a significantly bigger challenge than it might seem. The crux of the problem is that the file format isn’t a text format at all, but a graphical format....

Some time ago, I migrated the crawler off the okhttp library, to use Java’s builtin HTTP client. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but has led to a fair number of headaches. Java’s HttpClient has one damning flaw, and that that it doesn’t support socket timeouts. Its only supported timeout values are time to...

A problem the search engine’s crawler has struggled with for some time is that it takes a fairly long time to finish up, usually spending several days wrapping up the final few domains. This has been actualized recently, since the migration to slop crawl data has dropped memory requirements of the crawler by...

I’m happy and grateful to announce that the Marginalia Search project has been accepted for a second nlnet grant. All the details are not yet finalized, but tentatively the grant will go toward addressing most of the items in the project roadmap for 2025. I’ve already been working full time on the project since...

This text is satirical in nature. Tech news is abuzz with rude AI crawlers that forge their user-agent and ignore robots.txt. In my opinion, if this is all the AI startups can muster, they’re losing their touch. wget can do this. You need to up your game, get that crawler really rolling coal. Flagrant disregard for...

This update is a few days late, the canonical birth date of the project is Feb 26. It has been another year of Marginalia Search. The project is still ongoing, still my full time job, although the project is entering a somewhat more mature phase of development, most of the big pieces are in place and do a decent job...

A while back an update went live that, with some caveats, changes the time it takes for an update on a website to reflect in the search engine index from up to 2 months to 1-2 days. Conditions being if the website has an RSS or Atom feed. The big crawl job takes about two months, and is run partition by partition,...