Marginalia Search

Marginalia Search is an independent open-source search engine that operates out of Sweden and is mainly built and run by Viktor Lofgren. The vendor says it prioritises non-commercial content and helps people find small, personal and older websites that large engines bury. It runs its own crawler and index instead of reselling Google or Bing results, uses the AGPL licence and describes its technology as simple, with no AI.

Beyond the search box it offers an Explore page that shows random sites, a Site Viewer for link graphs and backlinks, and a public API. The project says it is funded by donations, grants and commercial API deals, has no investors, and keeps monthly costs around $200. For users it is a free tool; for publishers it is a way to be discovered.

• Own crawler and index. The engine crawls the web itself, with a refresh every 8 to 10 weeks and daily polling of RSS feeds for new posts. Its crawler identifies as search.marginalia.nu, and site owners can control it through robots.txt.
• Preference for non-commercial sites. Ranking leans toward text-heavy, non-commercial pages. The vendor argues that natural-language answer engines lose the ability to discover websites, so it uses traditional information retrieval to surface independent writing.
• Explore page. A page of randomly selected websites, refreshed with every visit, supports browsing without a query. The sample on the day we looked included personal blogs, hobby pages and neocities sites rather than commercial brands.
• Site Viewer. Enter a domain to see what the engine knows about it, including its link graph and backlinks. The page lists recently discovered domains with discovery times and asks users not to scrape the data but to email for an export.
• Privacy by default. The vendor states that tracking is filtered out, no data is shared with third parties and IP addresses are kept up to 24 hours. Cookies serve only to save settings, and the site claims GDPR and EU Cookie Directive compliance.
• Search API. A newer API at api2.marginalia-search.com takes a key in the API-Key header. A shared public key exists for testing, and parameters cover result count, timeout, results per domain, paging, a safe-search filter and custom filters.

• A researcher looking for primary, non-commercial sources. Searches for niche topics where mainstream results are filled with product pages, and reads personal sites and old essays that the engine promotes. Uses the Site Viewer to see who links to a promising source.
• An independent blogger. Wants the personal site to be found and follows the vendor's crawler instructions to be indexed. Checks the Site Viewer for backlinks and relies on RSS polling to get new posts picked up quickly.
• A developer building a search feature. Tests the API with the public key, requests a free non-commercial key by email, and moves to a metered commercial key if the product earns money from the results.

Open the website and type a query; no account is needed. The Explore page gives a quick feel for what is indexed. To change settings, the site stores a cookie, and the older version of the engine stays available through a link on the home page.

Site owners who want to be indexed follow instructions in a GitHub repository that the crawler page points to, and may allow or block the crawler by its robots.txt identifier. Developers email the webmaster for a free non-commercial API key or use the public key for tests, noting that it hits rate limits often. Little else needs setting up.

Marginalia Search is an independent open source engine operating out of Sweden, developed and run mainly by Viktor Lofgren. It prioritises non-commercial content, uses a custom crawler and index under the AGPL licence and keeps IP logs up to 24 hours. Its own about page calls it a niche tool, so it is a supplement, not a general default.

The search engines list places Marginalia Search 14 of 16: the products next to it are MetaGer above and SearXNG below. After the challenger places, Marginalia Search is one of the established names, ranked in order and without a score.

Marginalia Search is based in Sweden; 6 of the 16 products here share its region, Europe.

It prioritises non-commercial content, filters tracking and shares no data with third parties.

Access logs holding IP addresses are kept for up to 24 hours.

In the catalogue: No user price shown.

The search engine has no user price shown and no ads were described on the pages we read. The API page lists three key types. Free non-commercial keys are issued by email under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. A paid non-commercial key is a one-time optional payment that skips the queue and supports the project. A commercial key is metered and carries no usage restriction or attribution requirement. Amounts for the paid keys are not given in the text we could read; the vendor says other terms are negotiable by email. The About page says running costs are about $200 per month.

Where this comes from: the vendor pages at marginalia-search.com, checked for Best Search Engines in 2026 on 7 November 2026.

The privacy page says the site uses minimal JavaScript, sets cookies only to save settings, has no tracking pixels or social buttons, and keeps access logs with IP addresses for 24 hours. Anonymised logs may be kept longer to diagnose bugs. The source code is public under AGPL. Hosting provider, certifications and data-export tools for users are not stated.

Integrations the vendor names (5):

• REST API (api2.marginalia-search.com)
• OpenSearch description file
• RSS feed polling
• IP2Location LITE geolocation data
• Polar.sh commercial subscriptions

These are the nearest neighbours of Marginalia Search in the same list, picked on shared traits and price model.

• Mojeek (#2 of 16): UK crawler with its own index, no tracking and a metered API.
• Brave Search (#3 of 16): Independent index from the Brave browser company, with a paid API. Watch out: the price of the ad-free Premium option was not visible on the pages read, so it cannot be compared. (United States)
• Microsoft Bing (#11 of 16): Not for: developers wanting a plain search API without Azure. Microsoft's web search, and a named source for other engines here.
• SearXNG (#15 of 16): Metasearch engine that queries many services without tracking its users.

Read from the vendor’s own pages on 5 November 2026.

• marginalia-search.com: home page claims, open source, privacy summary
• about.marginalia-search.com: project philosophy, funding, costs, location
• about.marginalia-search.com/article/privacy: cookies, logs, retention
• about.marginalia-search.com/article/crawler: crawler identity, interval, indexing
• about.marginalia-search.com/article/api: API key types and parameters
• marginalia-search.com/site: Site Viewer
• marginalia-search.com/explore: Explore page

Four tests decide a position: how soon the product is useful, what the bill really becomes, how data leaves and who it suits. The result for Marginalia Search: #14, out of 16 ranked. Method and commercial relationships are in our editorial process.