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)
This is a bit of a follow up to the previous post. The Grand Code Restructuring [ 2023-03-17 ] Marginalia’s search result quality has, for a long while, been pretty good as long as your search query is a single term, but for multiple search terms it’s been a bit hit-and-miss. Marginalia was never great at this, but...
In general I don’t like to fuss over code, but this is exactly what I’ve been doing in preparation of the NLnet funded work. I’ve spent the last month restructuring Marginalia’s code base. It’s not completely done, but I’ve made great headway. Things got the way they got because in general for experimental...
No time like the project’s two year anniversary to drop this particular bomb… Marginalia’s gotten an NLNet grant. This means I’ll be able to work full time on this project at least a year. https://nlnet.nl/project/Marginalia/ This grant is essentially the best-case scenario for funding this project. It’ll be able to...
This is a very brief post announcing a fascinating discovery. It appears to be possible to use the cosine similarity approach powering explore2.marginalia.nu as a substitute for the link graph in an eigenvector-based ranking algorithm (i.e. PageRank). The original PageRank algorithm can be conceptualized as a...
I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but has the Internet gone progressively more crazy the last decade or so? It’s like everyone is so damn angry all the time. If they aren’t angry they’re bitter and resentful. And when they aren’t angry or bitter, they’re so depressed they’re barely able to crawl out of bed. And...
For clarification, this is discussing no other thing called Memex than memex.marginalia.nu, the website you’re probably visiting right now. That, or you’re reading this over gemini at marginalia.nu, which is serving the same content over a different protocol. I wanted to build a cross-protocol static site generator...
The most common (and most costly) operation of the marginalia search engine’s index is something like given a set of documents containing one keyword, find each documents containing another keyword. The naive approach is to just iterate over each document identifier in the first set and do a membership test in the...
This is a write-up about an experiment from a few months ago, in how to find websites that are similar to each other. Website similarity is useful for many things, including discovering new websites to crawl, as well as suggesting similar websites in the Marginalia Search random exploration mode. A link to a...
While this post is about programming, it also draws an extended analogy to dungeons and dragons, specifically two of its classes, that correspond to two attitudes toward programming. In D&D, wizards study magic. They prepare their magic spells ahead of time. While they may learn a large number of magic spells, they...
I get my best ideas when I’m not working. This seems paradoxical, but past a point, the more I work on a project the slower it seems to go. I’ll find changes to do, but lose any sort of vision. If I’m not programming at all, I rarely get good ideas as well. There appears to be some magic stoichiometric mixture where...
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