The need for discovery
Nothing you do to try to make the web a better place matters if nobody can find what you did. There are a lot of precious websites out there that deserve an audience, but instead are languishing in obscurity.
This makes alternative discovery mechanisms an urgent priority of the free and independent web, both document search as well as blog and RSS-feed discovery.
It's time to build
None of this is new. How long have been talking about the decrepit state of the web? How many pages of essays have been written, how long have we waited for the planets to align and the web somehow to fix itself? Seems very clear talking and writing isn’t going to fix the web. Rallies or pleas to the government isn’t going to fix the web either. Not even AI or Elon Musk is going to fix the web.
New search and discovery mechanisms stubbornly refuse to manifest almost no matter what we do, until we actually go build the things. You do not need VC funding, or a San Fransisco address, or even someone’s permission.
This is how it’s always been. Things exist on the web because someone built them. As a consequence, if you want something to exist on the web, you go build it.
Traditional information retrieval
A search engine’s ability to answer natural language queries comes at the cost of its ability to discover websites. The more human the answers become, the less human the results become. This has lead to a web that feels both small and lonely.
Natural language search is likely a dead end that will be consumed by GPT-style interfaces. Traditional Information Retrieval approaches still offer capabilities that have largely become lost in the rush toward natural language search by major search engines.
The need for multiple search engines
In practice, most alternative search engines are backed by Google or Bing, or authoritarian states such as Russia and China. The lack of diversity in search engines makes it terrifyingly easy to censor information on the web, even if this is not intentional, having every major search engine be based in United States imposes a significant cultural bias on the rest of the world using these services.
Marginalia isn’t seeking to replace Bing or Google, but to complement them, to provide a minority report that keeps them honest.
Business model
Web search has traditionally been difficult to monetize, which has pushed many search engines to go the route of advertisement, to the detriment of the search results.
The project is independent in that it has no loans, no investors looking for a payday, no strings attached anywhere to pressure it into doing anything than providing as much and as good internet search as it is capable of.
The marginalia search engine is designed to be very cheap to run and operate, and the goal is to provide outsized value, and thus be able to scrape by on donations, grants and commercial API-deals with other search engines.
The project currently has bills in the ballpark of $200/month, meaning it can keep operating even if funding runs completely dry, although this would cause development to stall almost completely.