Marginalia is not your typical search engine. Major search engines like Google Search or Bing Search are becoming vessels to push advertisement and sites that push advertisement. Yes, that is a generalization, but quality has arguably taken a turn for the worse in the past decade.

Apart from showing lots of ads, major search engines favor certain types of content and publishers. Google Search, for example, favors results from YouTube. One reason for that is that it owns YouTube and that Google profits whenever a user clicks on a YouTube result to watch a video with ads on the platform.

Marginalia's single developer says that the main purpose of the search engine is "to help you find and navigate the non-commercial parts of the Internet". It is an attempt to increase the visibility of this quirkier and less-standard part of the Internet.

In other words: the search engine is designed to find content that you won't find on the major search engines at all, or only after browsing dozens of results pages with content that is more or less identical.

To get started with Marginalia, head over to the project's website. You can type a search term directly in the search field at the top to get results. Before you do that, you may want to check out #the tips paragraph on the page and maybe read about some linked articles about the search engine.

The developer notes that the search engine "is not well equipped to answering queries posed like questions". Instead, users should search for text that matches the intent.

To give you an example. Instead of searching for "why is Google Chrome crashing all the time", you could search for "Google Chrome crash" or specify the symptoms by searching for "Google Chrome YouTube crash".

Marginalia Search

Search results look totally different from major search engines. First, there are no ads. Organic results begin right away and each result is listed with its URL first, then title and description.

There is an info link to look up information about the domain, a visualization of where on the page the search terms are found, and warnings about the use of affiliate links or JavaScript. If available, there may also be an age-rating.

Filters on the right are also different from the usual assortment. You can limit results with affiliate or tracking links, and remove sites that require JavaScript.

The standard domains filter is set to popular, but you may set it to small web, blogosphere, academia, forums and several others. There is also an option to disable the filter entirely.

Closing Words

Marginalia is a niche search engine. It works well for certain types of queries, and excels when it comes to finding resources that the major search engines tend to ignore for the most part.

There is an option to donate to the project to keep it up and running.

As a side note, I stumbled upon Marginalia here: How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

It is a long but interesting read.

Now You: what is your favorite search engine and why?