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Comment by fantasybroker | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure what the intention of this post is. In my handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia.

#1 "Gordon ramsey" (misspelled "Gordon Ramsay"). Marginalia shows "The Life I Imagine: are my cheeks red?". Kagi corrects to Gordon Ramsay and shows relevant results.

#2 "Ukraine war". Marginalia shows an article about the Russian Orthodox church and a Substack post about the war. Kagi shows Wikipedia, Al Jazeera, etc up-to-date summaries about the war.

#3 "Dildo". Top post on Marginalia is "Students for Concealed Carry Embraces UT Dildos | Students for Concealed Carry". Top posts on Kagi are Wikipedia (read) and Amazon (buy).

> How is Marginalia, a search engine built by a single person, so good?

Because it's not good?

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I don't disagree with your assessment in full, but I don't exactly consider wikipedia and Amazon good results. Like they are big enough that if that's the result I want I can go to them directly. So like they aren't bad or wrong, but I can see the case for excluding them. Should something like Webster's dictionary be a top result?

I think for single word queries like that Wikipedia covers more ground than a dictionary. Personal preference, perhaps. If I need a definition I search for "define dildo" (Kagi shows Merriam-Webster, Oxford, etc dictionary entries).

Marginalia supports the old Google syntax, e.g. "define:dildo"

Thanks! If you are that "single person" who built Marginalia... hope you are not taking my criticism personally. I am more annoyed by this blog post that uses a few handpicked queries to present generalized long winded conclusions that are completely disproven when using a different set of queries.

Yeah, its me, and to be fair I made a comment to a similar effect myself. Assessing search result quality is very hard, and this is definitely a pretty flattering selection of queries.

On the plus side - in addition to Marginalia's own success, you can take partial credit for how good Kagi search results are (IIRC Marginalia's index is one of the sources for Kagi search results). So... thank you for that!

Marginalia Search isn't trying to be a universal knowledge engine, it's just a website finder.

That's bad if you're looking for a simple answer or basic fact, and good if you're looking for a few hours of reading.

I had a similar experience when testing Kagi after reading this. The top result for the “wider car tires” query on Kagi was a link to Physics StackExchange with some marginally informative answers [0], which would be easy to expand on in future searches. The second result was Reddit. Then a couple of incorrect/irrelevant pages but they don’t look like scams

[0]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29903/why-do-peo...

Edit: I did just realize that I have StackExchange customized to be up-ranked. So that probably helps. But yeah, I guess this is why I usually get good results, which is something that generally still fails with Google for me.

It seems to me that the name "marginalia" is not just a random set of syllables. It sounds like it's doing what it says on the tin, which is gooder than not doing what it says on the tin. (distinct from whether what it says on the tin is something you want)

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