This is the source code for Marginalia Search.

The aim of the project is to develop new and alternative discovery methods for the Internet. It's an experimental workshop as much as it is a public service, the overarching goal is to elevate the more human, non-commercial sides of the Internet.

A side-goal is to do this without requiring datacenters and enterprise hardware budgets, to be able to run this operation on affordable hardware with minimal operational overhead.

The long term plan is to refine the search engine so that it provide enough public value that the project can be funded through grants, donations and commercial API licenses (non-commercial share-alike is always free).

The system can both be run as a copy of Marginalia Search, or as a white-label search engine for your own data (either crawled or side-loaded). At present the logic isn't very configurable, and a lot of the judgements made are based on the Marginalia project's goals, but additional configurability is being worked on!

Here's a demo of the set-up and operation of the self-hostable barebones mode of the search engine: 🌎 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwMkenQQ24

To set up a local test environment, follow the instructions in 📄 run/readme.md!

Further documentation is available at 🌎 https://docs.marginalia.nu/.

Before compiling, it's necessary to run ⚙️ run/setup.sh. This will download supplementary model data that is necessary to run the code. These are also necessary to run the tests.

If you wish to hack on the code, check out 📄 doc/ide-configuration.md.

A production-like environment requires a lot of RAM and ideally enterprise SSDs for the index, as well as some additional terabytes of slower harddrives for storing crawl data. It can be made to run on smaller hardware by limiting size of the index.

The system will definitely run on a 32 Gb machine, possibly smaller, but at that size it may not perform very well as it relies on disk caching to be fast.