# MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch

Internet search engine for text-oriented websites. Indexing the small, old and weird web.

Repository: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/marginaliasearch
Homepage: https://marginalia-search.com/
Language: Java
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Topics: search-engine, no-cloud, small-web, internet-search, indexer, language-processing, web-crawler, alt-search, self-hostable, java, web-scale
Last push: 2026-08-26T13:09:39+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 65/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 8, longevity 90
- inputs: {"age_days": 1262, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 688, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 1}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1923, forks 50 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:55.281419+00:00)

## What it is
Marginalia Search is an independent, open-source internet search engine that indexes text-oriented, non-commercial, small and old websites. It includes its own crawler, indexer, and search frontend, and can be self-hosted or run as a white-label search engine over your own crawled or side-loaded data.

## Use cases
- search the small, old and weird web for non-commercial content
- self-host my own internet search engine
- run a white-label search engine over my own crawled data
- discover independent blogs and RSS feeds outside big search engines
- crawl and index a custom corpus of websites
- find lost old websites that mainstream engines bury

## When to choose
- you want an independent, privacy-respecting search engine that prioritizes non-commercial content
- you need a self-hostable full search stack (crawler, index, frontend) without cloud dependencies
- you want to search or index text-heavy, hobbyist, or old-web content
- you want traditional information-retrieval search rather than AI/natural-language answers

## When to avoid
- you need a turnkey search widget for a small site or app docs (use lighter search libraries instead)
- you lack substantial RAM and storage; production-like deployments need ~32GB+ RAM and enterprise SSDs
- you need highly configurable ranking out of the box; configurability is still limited
- you need AI-powered or natural-language question answering

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: search-engine, web-scraping, nlp, http-server, self-hosted
- domain: web-development, crawlers, self-hosted
- platform: jvm, self-hosted
- tags: small-web, web-crawler, alt-search, independent-search-engine, indexer, no-cloud, white-label-search, search, natural-language-processing, linux, web-server

## Member repositories
- MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch (main) score 65

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:55.281419+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:09:37.149188+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:55.281419+00:00, sha 67382306879d)
  - homepage: https://marginalia-search.com/ (fetched 2026-08-29T10:48:55.801746+00:00, sha 733594212272)
  - site_page: https://about.marginalia-search.com/ (fetched 2026-08-29T10:48:55.810589+00:00, sha 53a632f33ebd)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.