An API for the search engine is available through api.marginalia.nu, or api.marginalia-search.com. Both endpoints are equivalent and will work as long as the project does.

The API is simple enough to be self-explanatory. Examples:

https://api.marginalia.nu/public/
https://api.marginalia.nu/public/search/json+api
https://api.marginalia.nu/public/search/json+api?count=10

For experimentation, the key “public” is available, as used in the examples on this page. This key has a shared rate limit across all consumers. When this rate limit is hit a HTTP status 503 is returned.

Query Parameters

Key and license

Please send an email to contact@marginalia-search.com if you want your own key with a separate rate limit. The search engine has seen quite a lot of problems with bot abuse, making this registration step a sad necessity.

By default the data is provided under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Other licensing and terms are negotiable.

• CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Sample code in python 3

import requests

url = "https://api.marginalia.nu/{key}/search/{query}";

rsp = requests.get(url.format(key='public', query="linear b"));

if rsp.ok:
  data = rsp.json()
  print ("Query: ", data['query'])
  print ("License: ", data['license'])
  print ("")
  for result in data['results']:
      print (result['url'])
      print ("\t" + result['title'])
      print ("\t" + result['description'])
      print ("")
else:
    print ("Bad Status " + str(rsp.status_code))

Something missing?

Please let me know if there are features you would like added to the API.

See also

• Data sets from the search engine