Marginalia
Viktor Lofgren
My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of websites on a common theme. If you find yourself clicking a link and ending up on a page that looks completely different, that’s just how things are.
July 2026
Top Words
- marginalia
- search
- index
- software
- years
- grant
- crawler
- astrolabe
- internet
- query
All posts (137)
I currently have 17 GB free space on my root drive, out of 0.47 TB usable space, that’s 3% free space. I also have an additional harddrive installed, 12 TB, it has 140 GB free, which may seem a lot but it’s actually only about 1%. Your harddrive is probably pretty full too. Maybe not as crammed, but odds are it’s...
There’s been some changes to Marginalia Search: Migrated to systemd from docker New unranked query endpoint Wide domains got their own index for faster crawls In brief, this has removed a lot of operational headaches, reduced expensive queries leaving more computational power for the rest, and cut crawl times in...
I was on the bus on my way to an important business meeting about the exponential growth of my MRR, when suddenly I noticed some troublemakers were hassling an old lady. Their caps were on backwards, their clothes were baggy, and probably thought the grindset was about skateboarding. I had to act. I opened my...
You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn. In the long term, learning new things is fun and makes life richer in ways you can’t even imagine, and it’s a time investment that will pay...
… optional, that is. I’ve been working on an NSFW filter for Marginalia Search, as that is something some people have asked for, primarily API consumers. The search engine has had some domain based filtering for a while, based on the UT1 lists, but that isn’t a very comprehensive approach. We’ll land on a single...
This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN...
The Marginalia Search index has recently seen some design tweaks to make it perform better, primarily the introduction of postings list compression. Last year, the index was partially re-implemented with SSDs in mind. This was largely a success, but left some lingering issues with tail latencies that sometimes...
The Marginalia Search default ranking algorithm recently saw a fairly radical improvement, due to a new domain trust system that drastically reduces the number of content farm results, as long as there are human results it usually finds them across all the usual test queries. Recently fixing a few bugs that made the...
Being clear about what your blog posts are about lets people who are interested in what you have to say find your writing more easily. The more paragraphs you spend getting to the point, the bigger the odds they’ll lose patience and click on something else before you’ve presented your thesis. When publishing...
The search engine recently exposed a fair number of new tools for custom filtering to the API consumers and users of the new UI. This was originally going to be an incredibly chaotic update, both annuncing the new features and doing a technical walkthrough of the changes but that ambition turned out a bit too...
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