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)
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...
At a previous job, we had a new and fancy office. The light switches were state of the art. There was an on button, and a separate off button. When you pressed the on button, the lights would fade on. When you pressed the off button, they would fade off. In the cloud somewhere was two functions that presumably...
The phenomenon of “normies” is an interesting one. The term itself is a bit problematic and not one I’d typically use, but as a phenomenon they are still worth investigating. Their perhaps biggest distinguishing feature is that they don’t get “it”, whatever it is. It’s tempting to think that these are an especially...
I’ve been thinking recently about the emphasis put on “new”, specifically for search engines, but the discussion has some merit even in a wider context. I will start wide and narrow down. It is common to conflate new with good, and most being young sometime between 1950-2000 will indeed have seen marvellous...
Search results are only as good as the search engine’s ability to figure out what a page is about. Sure a keyword may appear in a page, but is it the topic of the page, or just some off-hand mention? I didn’t really know anything about data mining or keyword extraction starting out, so I’ve had to learn on the fly....
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