“It would be really helpful to have other people dabble in search without having to build an entire search engine from scratch.”

Viktor Lofgren is the creator of Marginalia Search, a search engine takes you of the beaten track by letting you find small quality web pages. These pages barely surface in commercial search engines because they are snowed under by larger commercial websites and marketing. We interviewed Viktor for FreeWebSearchDay. You can listen to the recording of the interview or read the edited transcript below.

[ . . . ]

“…when you design a ranking algorithm you basically encode your own values and perspectives into the software. So if you don’t have enough software diversity in the sense that you have multiple search engines build by multiple people than you get a very one-sided view of the world. And having someone else come and build a search engine with ther own ranking algorithm for example, is that they would promote different types of content. And that would benefit people in general.”

[ . . . ]

“It would be really helpful to have other people dabble in search without having to build an entire search engine from scratch.”

[ . . . ]

“…there are a lot of assumptions that have been around since the ‘80s, or the ‘70s even, on how to build a search engine. So having fresh eyes on the problem, even if it does mean occasionally reinventing the wheel, is refreshing.”

[ . . . ]

“I am hopeful for the future that something good will come out of this and something like the Linux of internet search engines will emerge. Where people can collaborate and build something great together, open source.”