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)
The last few days I’ve felt like my first attempt at a ranking algorithm for the search engine was pretty good, like it was producing some pretty interesting results. It felt close to what I wanted to accomplish. The first ranking algorithm was a simple link-counting algorithm that did some weighting to promote...
https://search.marginalia.nu The October Update is live. It introduced drastically improved topic identification and an actual ranking algorithm; and the result is interesting to say the least. What’s striking is how much it’s beginning to feel like a search engine. When it fails to find stuff, you can kinda see...
If you look back in history to the turn of the 20th century, you will find a lot of people wearing hats. Women wore some arguably pretty funny over the top hats. A while earlier, over the men were arguably funny top hats. This isn’t the first time men and women wore funny clothes. The aristocrats in 1680s France...
gemini://friends.riverside.camp/~clarity/journal/branding.gmi gemini://idiomdrottning.org/re-branding Some interesting thoughts going around on the topic of branding in software and websites. I’ve had thoughts like these too, and designed a lot of my website purposefully un-branded. I have no logos, no banners,...
So hacker news apparently discovered my search engine, and really took a liking to the idea. Actually that’s a bit of an understatement, the thread has gotten 3.3k points and lingered on the front page for half a week. And I wasn’t planning for it to go quite that public yet. It has quietly been online for a while,...
I’ve spent some time the last week optimizing how the search engine identifies appropriate search results, putting far more consideration into where and how the search terms appear in the page when determining the order they are presented. Search-result relevance is a pretty difficult problem, but I do think the...
I spent some time today weeding out yet more link-farms from my search engine’s index. Typically what I would do is just block the subnet assigned to the VPS provider they’re on, and that does seem to work rather well. The cloud providers that don’t police what they host is almost always home to quite a lot of this...
There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion. It is an unfortunate...
I’m currently indexing with my search engine. This isn’t an always-on sort of an affair, but rather something I turn on and off as it tends to require at least some degree of babysitting. I’ve also been knocked out by the side-effects of the vaccine shot I got the other day, so it’s been mostly hands-off...
This an expansion on a comment I left on Lettuce’s gemlog post, “Personal Experiences and Opinions on Version Control Software”. I’ve seen similar questions posed several times recently, in essence people searching for a good git provider. The thing is you don’t need a git provider. Git is a shell command, and you...
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