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’ve experimentally replaced some of the Java implementations of quicksort and binary search with calls to C++ code, and saw huge benefits for the sorting code but the same or worse performance for binary search. The Marginalia Search engine is mainly written in Java, which is language that is good at many things,...
A neat property of the parquet file format is that it’s designed with block I/O in mind, so that when you are interested in only parts of the contents of a file, it’s possible to some extent to only read that data. Many tools are aware of this property, and DuckDB is one of them. Depending on which circles you run...
Been working on improving Marginalia Search query parsing and understanding. This is going to be a pretty long update, as it’s a few months’ work. Apart from cleaning up the somewhat messy query parsing code, a problem I’m trying to address is that the search engine is currently only good at dealing with fairly...
The project has been haunted by a mysterious bug since sometime February. It relates to the code that constructs the index, particularly the code that merges partial indices. In short the search engine constucts the reverse index through successive merging of smaller indices, which reduces the overall memory...
I set out a little over a week ago to add a service registry to Marginalia Search, primarily to reduce its dependence on docker. I would like it to be able to run on bare metal as well, which poses a problem since configuring the application manually is a bit of a headache with dozens of ports that need to be set...
It’s been three years since the inception of Marginalia Search, then a dinky experiment to find where the heck the cool Internet has gone, now my full time job. While there’s always things that can be improved, it’s fair to say the search engine has never worked as well as it does right now. A great number of...
One of the great joys of working on a search engine is that you get to reverse engineer SEO spam, and overall study how it evolves over time. I’ve been noticing the search engine spam strategy of adding ‘reddit’ to page titles for a few years now, but it feels like it’s been growing a lot recently. I don’t think...
I get significantly more work done when I unplug my computer from the Internet. It’s not that my productive output drops to zero when I’m plugged in, but more like 70%. Despite many of the tools that I use requiring a connection, and certainly the Internet containing a wealth of information that might expedite my...
You have a hobby you’ve been into for a decade or more. You like talking about your hobby, and your friends and family, after listening to these things for as long as you’ve been into them, maybe aren’t as excited to always hear about it as you are about discussing them, so in an act of compassion you create a...
This is a bit of a retrospective of every project I’ve worked on, as far as I remember them. I’ve tried to unearth any artifacts that remain. Far from everything is flattering and resounding success, but then again, maybe that’s good. There are definitely patterns in the things that didn’t pan out. Earliest Traces I...
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