Marginalia Search Introduction
Marginalia Search is a free and open source search engine developed and operated by Viktor Lofgren. It uses its own web crawler to build its index independent of any other search engine (contrast with many options that use Google’s or Bing’s index). It is useful for finding small, independent, and old-web websites. In addition to being a search engine, Marginalia offers several tools for finding information about websites in its growing index. One of these tools is a backlink checker, which displays backlinks to one site in Marginalia’s index from other indexed sites. In this article, I will demonstrate how to create a custom search engine shortcut to Marginalia’s backlink tool.
A Refresher on Custom Search Engine Shortcuts
Results for searches are displayed as URLs. For example, using our own site’s search box to search for the term “platypus” leads us to the following URL:
https://thenewleafjournal.com/?s=platypus
The New Leaf Journal can be added as a custom search engine to most web browsers. But in order to add it, you first need the GET URL. We can obtain this by using %s as a search query place-holder.
https://thenewleafjournal.com/?s=%s
Both Chromium-based (e.g., Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Vivadli, Opera) and Firefox-based web browsers support adding search engine shortcuts for engines outside the list of default offerings in the format I described above. I recently demonstrated how to add the “No AI” version of DuckDuckGo to both Firefox and Brave and my 2021 article on alternative search engines listed the “GET URLs” for various search engines/front-ends that one would use to add them to a browser.
Pertinent to this article, it is possible to add “custom search engines” and shortcuts for things that are not “traditional” search engines and front-ends. For some creative examples, see Brave and DuckDuckGo Timer Search Shortcuts, Wallabag Custom Search Engine Shortcuts, Adding custom search shortcut for Wayback Machine, and Custom Search Shortcut For Norton Safe Web. Or, in my initial example, site-specific search.
In this article, I will presuppose that readers are familiar with how to add custom search engines to their web browser of choice. Readers who are not yet familiar may consult my prior writing, Google’s documentation for Chrome (should be generally applicable to all Chromium-based browsers), and Mozilla’s documentation for Firefox (note I recommend the Search Engines Helper plugin for Firefox).
Shortcut for Normal Marginalia Search Query
Marginalia Search’s main purpose is being a search engine with its own independent and somewhat specialized index. To add its default search as a custom search engine, one would add its very simple GET URL to their browser’s search engine list:
https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=%s
It is possible to set custom search engines for narrower Marginalia searches. As you can see in the above screenshot, Marginalia Search has filters (Blogs, Academia, Vintage, Small Web, Wikis, Forums, Recipes) and Advanced Settings (Search in Title, Recent Results, Remove JS, Reduce Adtech, Reduce NSFW, and Language). Both filters and Advanced Settings add parameters to the search URL. Those parameters can be made into a GET URL. For example, if I wanted make a GET URL with the “Blogs” filter and “Reduce Adtech” setting enabled, my URL would be:
https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=%s&profile=blogosphere&adtech=reduce
I highly recommend adding Marginalia Search to your web browser as a custom search engine. It is no mere curiosity, but instead a valuable resource which assisted me in putting together numerous articles including (but not limited to) Bill’s Secret Garden – A Pokémon Generation 1 Urban Legend, Sega of Japan’s Yukawa Dreamcast Commercials, Engrossing but not Excessively Addictive, and 1999 Post on Priscilla Pigsley the Guinea Pig. But going forward in this article, we will focus on adding niche Marginalia “custom search engine shortcuts” to our browser.
Marginalia Site Search Shortcut
Mr. Lofgren has slowly implemented features in Marginalia Search to display information from its index beyond traditional search results. For example, Marginalia has a “Site Search” which turns up information it holds about a specific domain (URL).
Now let us try searching for an unfamiliar domain such as thenewleafjournal.com:
We are taken to a page which shows information Marginalia has about the domain. It includes a homepage screenshot, feed of recent articles, crawl statistics, similar domains (I will note three of the top-four are defunct), and linked domains. This information could be useful for people who are interested in learning more about one site or another. Fortunately, we can create a custom search engine shortcut by replacing “thenewleafjournal.com” (our search term in the example) with %s:
https://marginalia-search.com/site/%s
Marginalia Backlinks Search Shortcut
The Marginalia Site page has several tabs.
- Website > Overview, Availability, Server, Requests
- Documents
- Backlinks
It is possible to make custom search shortcuts that would, upon triggering the shortcut and entering a domain, take one to any of these pages for the domain. For this article, we will focus on the Backlinks tab.
This tab shows links to the domain in question from other sites in Marginalia’s index. How useful this be will depend on the site in question and whether sites that link to the site in question are fully indexed by Marginalia Search. In the case of New Leaf Journal, Marginalia is aware of a decent number of backlinks, but far fewer than I see in Google, Bing, and Yandex Webmaster portals. The backlinks are also not as well organized as they are in the Webmaster tools for the major search engines, but both of these issues (as they are) may improve with time.
Marginalia Search’s backlinks tool is already a useful resource for examining links to websites from other sites around the web. Fortunately, we can take from the URL for the backlinks page for thenewleafjournal.com a GET URL that we can add to search engines as a custom search engine shortcut:
https://marginalia-search.com/site/%s?view=links
Readers may note that it is exactly the same as the site search shortcut but with the addition of ?view=links at the end.
Conclusion
Marginalia Search is an independent search engine first and foremost. But I appreciate that it is experimenting with making interesting information available about websites in its index. The most interesting of these tools (to me at least) is the backlink checker. As we see above, we can use a search engine shortcut to check backlinks to any domain that is in Marginalia’s growing index. Speaking of Marginalia’s growing index, I encourage my fellow webmasters to make sure that their site configurations are not blocking Marginalia and other legitimate search engine crawlers.
