Marginalia comes up on HN every so often, and I always look at it, think "oh that's neat!", maybe add it to my bookmarks toolbar, and then forget about it. Are there a lot of people who find themselves using it daily?
That said, it's gotten way better at finding stuff with the last few releases.
I also think that having "a google", one central search engine, is inherently a bad thing for the health of the Internet. It drives a lot of this search engine spam epidemic we're seeing.
A broader and (IMO) more interesting problem is Internet discovery.
I bet one could make a facinating ranking algo that groups sites by subject then sort them by nr of links to others in that group.
So the perfect SEO would be to have a blogroll at the top of the left menu with every related website in it.
i.e. 3 stores sell the same item. Nr 1 is the one linking to the other 2. Extra points for linking to that specific product page.
Even besides the point that the websites they indexed were a lot less adversarial, they put a lot of emphasis on indexing academia, and were outspoken against what came to be their present mixed motives[1].
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=spanish+rice+recip...
[1] https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/ma...
Made me chuckle a bit.
I use it mostly for tech/programming/FOSS stuff. Especially for programming topics it can be good for filtering out all the ‘w3schools’ type of blog spam that just floods Google’s results.