[HN Gopher] Language Support for Marginalia Search
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       Language Support for Marginalia Search
        
       Author : Bogdanp
       Score  : 160 points
       Date   : 2025-10-21 06:48 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.marginalia.nu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.marginalia.nu)
        
       | ofalkaed wrote:
       | Surprisingly informative for what is pretty much a press release,
       | learned a good deal about search engines.
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | (author)
         | 
         | I'm kinda allergic to writing "I did the thing" posts, so I
         | can't help but tryhard and attempt to make them compelling
         | somehow.
         | 
         | Writing in this manner is also very helpful in making sense of
         | the work for myself. Takes a better understanding of the
         | subject to thoroughly explain what you've built than to merely
         | build it. Sometimes I've gone back and read through one of
         | these updates to just get a refresher on what my thinking was
         | when I built something.
        
           | ofalkaed wrote:
           | In my experience, that is pretty much what marginalia search
           | is. I rarely get what I expect but I always get something
           | very interesting that makes me understand my expectations
           | better which is very helpful in accomplishing my goals.
           | Thanks for your work, marginalia is probably my favorite
           | little corner of the web.
        
       | reedf1 wrote:
       | Took me too long to realize this wasn't a tool to search for
       | marginalia in scanned manuscripts.
        
         | iamnothere wrote:
         | Hey, at least it isn't named after a very large number, an
         | excited exclamation, or a sound effect. Surely no product with
         | one of those names would ever succeed.
        
           | marginalia_nu wrote:
           | I probably should have named it cartoon-trombone.wav in
           | retrospect.
        
       | internet_points wrote:
       | What tools/data do you use for pos-tagging? I'm guessing it has
       | to be fast, to run without a google data center :)
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | I'm using RDRPosTagger[1], though I've optimized the code a bit
         | so that it's not just algorithmically efficient, but to use the
         | language in a way that is fast. It isn't _perfect_ , but it's
         | good enough to be useful.
         | 
         | Language detection and sentence splitting are the other two
         | slow bits of processing.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/datquocnguyen/RDRPOSTagger
        
       | mariusor wrote:
       | Off topic, but would there be a way to integrate marginalia with
       | a specific website? Similarly to how people use google search for
       | their forums or how HN uses algolia?
       | 
       | I'm asking this as one of my projects is a link aggregator
       | similar to old reddit (and HN to some extent) and I would like to
       | be able to present to users a search box, but without having to
       | implement document indexing and search. (I assume ad principio
       | that the website is already aligned ethically and technologically
       | with what Marginalia stands for :D)
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | Should be soon-ish. I'm working right now on laying the ground
         | works for ad-hoc domain filters. That's technically already
         | possible but comes at a too big performance impact that it
         | deteriorates the search results.
         | 
         | When it works, one of the things I have in mind is making a
         | site search-esque functionality available, as well as exposing
         | it via the public API so that it can be whiteboxed.
        
           | mariusor wrote:
           | Nice. Is there a way to track the work you're doing there
           | (and in general actually)?
        
             | marginalia_nu wrote:
             | Best is probably the search-engine tag on my blog[1]. It's
             | the closest you get to release notes for the project.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.marginalia.nu/tags/search-engine/
        
       | juliend2 wrote:
       | I remember asking you for this, so Thank you so much! It works
       | quite well from what I can see.
       | 
       | Small UI issue: on Desktop, the left sidebar should be
       | scrollable, because now on Firefox I can't reach the "Language"
       | menu item in the search results view, unless I zoom-out.
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-21 23:01 UTC)