Marginalia Search has received an NLNet grant | Hacker News Reader

Marginalia Search has received an NLNet grant

memex.marginalia.nu

112 pointsasicsp17 comments

That is great news.

Most of the time I'm annoyed at the projects that manage to get funding, because generally the people that do the work don't have the time nor the inclination to fill paperwork for getting the grants, and the people that have that time and inclination, rarely do the work. So, in my experience, the grants get dispatched to mostly worthless causes that produce very little benefit. I'm very glad that this is not the case here.

I think part of it is that it feels uncomfortably audacious to apply for something like this. Doesn't come natural for my modest ass. Of course, you won't get any grants you don't apply for.

To be real, it's a doubly great thing I did. Not just for the project, but me. This comes at a time when kinda exhausted from working what is essentially two jobs. It's worn on my relationships, my physical and mental health. I absolutely love the work, but the way I've been juggling things is an unsustainable one-way ticket to burnout city and I'm fully aware of the fact.

I would appreciate a writeup of how you built the proposal, if you have the time.

I'm in a somewhat similar position - not enough time, interest to apply for grants - despite working on projects that might qualify.

To be perfectly honest I didn't put that much effort into it. It was a couple of days at most for the initial submission.

I have a rough plan of what I want to do with the project the upcoming years, so I basically put together something that seemed like a reasonable effort and sent it off not really expecting much to come of it.

They came back a month or so later wanting more details, and I put another day into fleshing it out a bit more. Then it's been back and forth like that for a few months.

Overall the NLnet people have given me a very good impression, they've been easy to work with. As far as I understand they've sort of positioned themselves as a mediator between the EU bureaucrats wanting to give money and the projects/tech people that aren't necessarily fluent in bureaucracy. Seems to work very well.

Very cool, /u/marginalia_nu. From one web crawler enthusiast to another.

But I can’t really call you an enthusiast any more if you’re getting paid!

Congratulations, really great news for independent search engines landscape!

Thanks, Vlad :D

Using a dedicated on-disk file format, that is, a custom index has much advantages, optimizations opportunities. I thought using an existing OKVS would be an advantage from a time to market perspective, but it is not the case :)

I think most off-the-shelf stuff is a dead end. You see fairly frequent attempts using both KVS:es and like elasticsearch or similar. Like you can get it to work, but it just doesn't scale.

Congrats dude! Your project is mentioned here all the time. If only you just gave it a "better" name.

Naming things and cache invalidation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think marginalia is an awesome name!

It's also the name of a useful Emacs package.

Just munge it together into marginulia

Congratulations on this! As a hobbyist search engine enthusiast I’ve really enjoyed following your project and blog posts these last few years. I’m looking forward to what the next year brings!

Amazing!

I am glad a nonprofit noticed the value of the search engine.

Well done!!

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