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A Search Engine Designed To Surprise You

“Marginalia” up-ranks sites that are text-heavy — with truly offbeat results. Call it “serendipity engineering”

Clive Thompson
OneZero

Surprise!

Hey nerds: I recently stumbled across “Marginalia Search”. It’s a search engine with a fascinating design — rather than give you exactly what you’re looking for, it tries to surprise you.

How does it do this? By up-ranking web sites that are text-heavy, and downranking ones that are highly visual, loaded with modern web cruft, and SEO-optimized.

The upshot, as the creator suggests, is that you wind up with a lot of weird results very different from the usual fare coughed up by Google or Bing or even DuckDuckGo. Marginalia is doing …

… in a sense the opposite of what most major search engines do, they favor modern websites over old-looking ones. Most links you find here will be nearly impossible to find on a regular search engine, as they aren’t sufficiently search engine optimized.

This may seem a choice from some sort of nostalgia, which in part is true, but there is more to it. The hypothesis is something akin to the Lindy-effect: If a webpage has been around for a long time, then odds are it has fundamental redeeming quality that has motivated keeping it around all for that time. Looking…

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Responses (5)

What are your thoughts?

Sounds like a fun search engine. I can’t wait to try it.
Well it certainly surprised me.
This was very fun. But I have to say the searches I've done so far have come back with mostly trash. Lots of shopping cart pages, wikipedia entries, and the occasiuonal parts of ebooks. But still cheers mate, this is cool stuff.