The search engine has been given a re-design, and moved to a new domain!

The redesign gives it a bit more modern look, while trying to preserve the same information density as the old design. The old design will still be available if that is preferred.

Summary of changes

The backing tech is the same, and it’s still developed by the same person, there has been no acquisition or startup pivot or anything like that.

The old search.marginalia.nu domain will redirect to marginalia-search.com, which has the new UI.

The old UI will be available at old-search.marginalia.nu if you still prefer that, it will likely stay available for a very long time.

For the API, both api.marginalia.nu and api.marginalia-search.com will work.

The user-agent will remain the same as before, that is search.marginalia.nu . Changing this would only break robots.txt rules, and since the old the domain will redirect to the new in perpetuity, there is no reason to change this.

Why?

The search engine started as a small hobby project, and as such made sense to keep on a subdomain of my blog. In the years since, it has grown a bit too much of its own thing to quite continue living like that. Thus, it will move to marginalia-search.com and get its own visual identity.

There was also a small cadre of people who thought it was a Russian website, and I’ll admit .nu and .ru do look a bit alike if you squint. Margialia Search is not and has never been Russian.

But primarily, we’re at a point when the search engine is starting to become quite versatile and useful. It has always had impressively lucid moments, but been a bit too hit and miss for daily use. While there’s definitely more work to be done with regards to search result quality, huge improvements have been made and it’s beginning to approach a point where it could be a feasible daily driver for some people.