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Comment by Levitating | Hacker News Reader

I recently wrote an essay about this search engine, and its ranking algorithms.

Initially Marginalia used an interesting variant of PageRank discussed in the original paper, called Personal Pagerank.[1] Currently pages are ranked with BM25.

I think Personalized PageRank is still used for a new feature of Marginalia which is ranking pages based on similarity. I think this is already integrated into the website but there used to only be this testing page: https://explore2.marginalia.nu/

In any case I have a lot of respect for the creator. Marginalia has seen a lot of growth and it's been interesting reading the blogposts.[2]

[1]: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/26-personalized-pagerank/ [2]: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/

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I'm using PPR for domain rankings, but it's a very weak factor. It mostly affects the physical ordering on the results in the index, and given that queries have a timeout they'll execute for, it makes it so that higher ranking results are discovered first. Though in general, as I mentioned, this is a weak effect.

Explore2 and the website discovery tools now built into the search engine are using cosine similarity of the incident link vectors. I wrote a blog post about the technique called "Creepy Website Similarity" available :-) https://www.marginalia.nu/log/69-creepy-website-similarity/

Two things I've noted with the redesign (I hope it's ok to share it here):

* I couldn't find the random button. But, I used the old site to find the correct URL. [0]

* The random URL on the old site is broken. [1]

[0]: https://marginalia-search.com/explore/random

[1]: https://old-search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

where is the recent essay?

It was for a university assignment, I am not sure if I could or should share it.

If you don't share the task description or other materials provided by your university, I don't see the problem with sharing your essay. (Not a lawyer)

It's a sure fire way to get your uni submission incorrectly flagged as plagiarism. How straightforward it is to prove you're the original author varies by institution.

once the essay is already graded, it should not matter. and less as time passes.

on the contrary i thought any essay, paper or report written for uni or school can be considered for publication in some form. not everything is worth publishing of course, but if it is, talk to your supervisors about it.

http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/65166/ddg#65208

Ah, that makes sense - didn't really it was a uni thing.

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