5 ms·
It's one of my smorgasbord search engines run from a script (which collectively do so much better than Google or any of the legacy "big-tech" engines) Why it m
by nonrandomstring 5y ago
It's one of my smorgasbord search engines run from a script (which
collectively do so much better than Google or any of the legacy
"big-tech" engines)
Why it matters
One of the great American philosophical orators, Rick Roderick (a
Texan cowboy philosopher and academic twin of Bill Hicks), spoke about
the importance of "the margins":
Rick notices that in history certain people do not get a voice;
Women. The Poor. Old and young people. The "mad" and disabled. Race
minorities within any group. Thinkers more than a decade ahead of
their time.
There's even a thing called "marginal analysis" in hermeneutics - not
the economic concept - the analysis of things that have been left out
of history, and why, and by whom (victors writing and re-writing
history etc). Erasure leaves a trace that tells its own tale.
These things have become the grist of social justice today (with all
it's positive and negative sides). But "injustice" is not really
Roderick's point. It hardly needs mentioning that most people get a
bad deal, don't get heard, and their lives fade into obscure
irrelevance.
What matters is the enormous value and importance of marginal
contributions. These are lost. Almost every great discovery, it turns
out on deeper analysis, was made by an (or often, simultaneously
several) obscure nobody years earlier, who didn't provide a recognised
proof in the right journal, or didn't patent the thing. In Plato and
Shakespeare, Roderick says, "It is always the fool who delivers the
important news". Things don't start at the center, they begin on the
margins and diffuse in until they find legitimacy in an acceptable
voice.
A marginal search engine engine is, almost by definition, acting
counter to the status quo, as the Internet Archive stands in
opposition to fickle entropy of bitrot and ephemeral culture.
Well done on this project and good luck.
- UncleMeat 5y agoWhile this is all true and all good, “marginalia” is a completely different word for a completely different thing. It refers to handwritten content in the margins of books.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoThe word is a Latin adjective and just means marginal. It's most frequently used for marginal notes, but I don't see why you couldn't use it in other contexts as well.
- dez 5y agoYou have a neat way with words. I enjoyed reading this.
- drBonkers 5y agoI'd like to second this and ask how you learned to write?
- nonrandomstring 5y agodrBonkers I think most writers get there by reading a lot and we're recurrences of our influences. Content wise I've found mixing classics with modern, deep with superficial, serious with humour, is important. It balances things like a decent exercise regime.
- LichenStone 5y agoMay I ask what other search engines you use? I'm trying to find good alternatives to the usual right now.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago#alias search-1='w3m https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com' alias search-1="torw3m -no-proxy duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/" alias search-4='www https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/' alias search-2='www https://infotiger.com/ https://infotiger.com/' alias search-3='www https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/' alias search-5='www https://rightdao.com/ https://rightdao.com/' alias search-6='www https://www.mojeek.com/ https://www.mojeek.com/'
- LichenStone 5y agoThanks! That's really useful.
- Seirdy 5y agoA few more I found: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe... I recommend Teclis, Wiby, Kagi's "non-commercial" lens (mostly powered by Teclis), and and Gnomit (old results only, helps against the recency bias) to add some serendipity to your searches.
- up_o 5y agoI'd be very interested in checking out your SE script.
- nonrandomstring 5y agoThere's two I use. Nothing fancy like collecting and sorting results from multiple engines. Just a bash sequence. alias se1="se1.com" alias se2="se2.com" www-browser se1 $1; www-browser se2 $1 ... Arrange them in roughly the order best to worse. If a result isn't satisfactory I hit q (exit for my choice of browser) and it falls through to the next search engine. The other is surf-raw (actually written by everyone's favourite political prisoner, Mr. Assange) You can change the "elvi" to be what you want, but imho it doesn't really offer much extra because you still need to remember the aliases you gave each search engine. A sequence in an alias file hides that from you so I just type $ search "keywords about thing" Of course it falls over when different search engines parse the urlstring in different ways.
- kakkan 5y agoWould you recommend more resources to learn about his work?
- nonrandomstring 5y agoRoderick? There's a lot here [1] and the usual life summary here [2]. Sadly he passed away too soon and recordings of his lectures are a bit collectable. [1] http://rickroderick.org/ http://rickroderick.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Roderick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Roderick
- marginalia_nu 5y agoMake sure you use the API if you want to query my search engine programmatically, as I do use some bot mitigation strategies for the web interface. If you want to use the API for more than just one-off queries, you can also send me an email and get a key so you get your own rate limit. https://api.marginalia.nu/ https://api.marginalia.nu/