A short time before I started following blogs with RSS, I came across Dan Luu’s blog (someone was referring to it as an example of a good looking blog with no CSS at all).
It was a treasure trove of well thought-out and very well-written essays. And one of the most interesting pieces is about search engines, where (among others) Luu claims that one of the best search engines around is an indie project called Marginalia Search.
At first this piece of information washed over my mind. But at times when I was frustrated with not finding the right results on Google, I tried Marginalia and the results were surprisingly useful.
One of the most dramatic examples happened today. I was looking for a way to quickly deploy a bare-bones ClojureScript website (like this). But even the simplest YouTube walkthrough looked quite complicated.
Google quickly (and correctly) returns a relevant Stack Overflow answer.
But the two top voted answers are complicated, involving running a custom-made bash script to deploy on github pages.
I was looking for some kind of super-simple, no-brainer experience, like deploying a Next project on Vercel. It seemed none was available.
Fortunately, I tried Marginalia and was immediately pointed to an excellent step-by-step tutorial.
Not sure whether this is just a fluke, but I will have a lot more time for Marginalia from now on.