Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

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My personal website has 0-ads or anything malicious, 100% original content, yet it still doesn't show up in the first 5 pages when searching marginalia for `<first-name> <last-name>'. There are some marginally noteworthy folks who share my name, but it's basically some artist nobody cares about, a Floridian pest control expert who I regularly get mis-addressed email replies from, and a low-ranked pro football player with an unexceptional web presence nobody appears to care about. I thought I could at least eek out a out #4 or #3, but no?

I imagined my ad-free, www-free, firstname-lastname domain would be welcome on marginalia, but it seems deranked just like what Google has inexplicably done since I bought the domain. Despite following best practices and webmaster console recommendations. A squatter owned the domain for some time before 2010, but there's no evidence of interesting nefarious activity.

My first name-lastname GitHub account, linked from my site homepage, has a noteworthy number of open-source contributions to all sorts of projects.

P.s. marginalia_nu: Your Java and architectural design is beautiful, you're a true craftsman. <3 Best in show.

Could you email me the domain name to contact@marginalia-search.com (or share it here if you don't mind linking it to your account)? I'll have a look and see what's up.

> P.s. marginalia_nu: Your Java and architectural design is beautiful, you're a true craftsman. <3 Best in show

Well like any project this size (especially when it's a one man show) it has its warts and the design isn't entirely uncontroversial[1], but I'm pretty happy with it.

[1] Last time I posted about it someone likened it to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ , not entirely unfairly, though it does look like it does for very solid reasons that go beyond "netflix uses microservices", which is usually where things don't work out so well.

Are you sure you're in the index?

https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/submit-site-to-marginali...

Do all sites manually submit themselves via PR? I'm happy to do it, never encountered this information previously.

(Creator of the search engine) It's not required, they will be discovered eventually, though it's a way of speeding up the process, as the index is anything but exhaustive still.

Submitted manually more than once in the last year and still no listings.

Completely understand that you'd be overwhelmed by bots, that personally curating sites is beyond human effort, and that you want to be choosy.

But I've a site that is clearly non-commercial, definitely "marginal" interest, full of completely original human-generated content, yet sadly I've never seen a hit from Marginalia in the logs despite trying to get listed.

Are you excluding certain content? Political? Anti-Bigtech? Sites "related to hacking"?

I'm blacklisting a few websites that are very spammy, like e-pharma spam and the like, and a small number of websites that are in very poor taste, but it should tell you that the domain is blocked if you use the site inspector[1].

Either way, I'd love to investigate to see what's going on. Mind sharing the domain name? Either here, or if you don't want to doxx yourself, email contact@marginalia-search.com

[1] https://marginalia-search.com/site

Thank you, I will DM you as suggested.

If and only if your site isn't already referenced by some other site in the index (see option A).

I'm up on the first page, in some thing from 17 years ago.

The internet is kind of like a fire. Most things go away but a few things miraculously survive for fairly unexpected and benign reasons.

I suppose the real question is: How heavily does Marginalia consider Google (and other primary indices) ranking? Because Google inexplicably hates my good-actor domain and continues to instead promote the likes of cyberciti[d0t]bjz and nixcrapt[d0t]c0m.

Not looking at Google at all. All indexing is custom and in-house.

I doubt that it considers Google at all, just submit your site.

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