www.marginalia.nu

You may be looking for one of the following things

🔗 Search Engine
🔗 Encyclopedia (not mobile-friendly!)
🔗 Website Explorer^improved
🔗 Similar Website Finder
🔗 Server Status

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.

🌎 Marginalia Search on GitHub
🦤 @MarginaliaNu on Twitter
🦤 @marginalia@mastodon.social
📺 @ViktorLofgren on YouTube
✉️ kontakt@marginalia.nu on Email

Site Index

Recent Updates

2024-04-17 Query Parsing and Understanding in log

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 focused queries, they don’t need to be short, but if you try to qualify a search that is too broad by adding more terms, it often doesn’t produce anything useful.

2024-04-10 Deep Bug in log

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 requirement. You can conceptualize the revese index itself as two files, one with offset pointers into another file, which has sorted numbers. This code runs after each partition finishes crawling and processing its data, and has a run time of about 4 hours.

2024-04-03 2 Sigma Education in problems

It is a pretty well known fact that if you give kids one-on-one tutoring from experts, they outperform classroom-educated students by an absurd two standard deviations. The effect size is absolutely mind-boggling, and a damning brand of indictment against the entire modern education system. The problem is that this stuff clearly doesn’t scale, for two reasons; first of all there isn’t enough experts to go around, as it would require a large chunk of the adult population to be experts dedicated to tutoring, and second of all, even if this was the case, having a dozen or more teachers per student would trivially be something like 300x more expensive than having 20-30 students per teacher.

2024-02-28 The Yak Shave in log

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 up. It would also be desirable to be able to run multiple instances of important services in order elliminate downtime during upgrades.

2024-02-25 Marginalia: 3 Years in log

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 milestones have been reached, perhaps biggest of all the search engine has moved out of my living room and into a proper enterprise server.

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