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Marginalia Search is an independent, open source, keyword-based Internet search engine with its own crawler operating out of Sweden
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- Title
- Marginalia Search
- Word count
- 58 words
It runs its own crawler and builds its own index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it.
Last time I tried Marginalia a few years back the results were decent, but not great, but now? they seem to be fairly adequate in their results, the layout and filtering system is very well made, and its the way i still search by default.
I really enjoy this 'discover' link that randomly shows screenshots of 12(?) or so sites to discover on every load. Very stumbleupon-like.
Can you explain what you mean by "decent, not great" vs "adequate"? They both read as about the same quality level to me.
they were decent results, but not all time; they are now adequate for a reasonable number of searches.
decent being that that were decent enough to use for some limited things, adequate for now being decent enough more regularly.
I've been using it for at least a couple of years and regularly find it better for the old building or trade information I often need. DDG and google are likely to present me various variations on slop, Marginalia will at least give me something different and there's a reasonable chance it'll be useful. It serves up plenty of utter nonsequiturs as well, which is disconcerting if you aren't used to it.
Curious if you’ve used Kagi at all and how it compares?
They’re the only one that I’ve found that can come close to what Google used to offer in terms of quality results.
A few cursory searches makes it seem like it’s on par with something like DuckDuckGo or Bing, which I’d put a level below Google.
Not sure how I feel about the styling but I do really like that it tells you if sites use affiliate links. I’m not opposed to them but I like the transparency.
FWIW, there's a whole world of alternate search engines out there, that build their own indices, use their own crawlers or otherwise don't rely on the commercial engines.
Granted, Marginalia is among the best, most stable, and most long-lived ... but there are many others to explore.
This list is somewhat outdated (made in 2021, last updated in 2025), but it is still the most complete list I've found. Seirdy has published several other posts about alternate search, as well, worth looking thru their history.
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/