---
title: "Marginalia"
description: "Marginalia Search, an independent index of small personal sites and plain text pages, usable without a key when you name it."
canonical_url: "https://web.agntn.dev/providers/marginalia"
---
# Marginalia

> Marginalia Search, an independent index of small personal sites and plain text pages, usable without a key when you name it.

<provider-facts provider="marginalia">



</provider-facts>

Marginalia indexes its own crawl and leans toward personal sites, blogs and plain HTML documentation. Ask it about "rust async" and the top hits are fasterthanli.me and a couple of personal blogs, not the usual content farms. Worth having next to a Google style provider, because it finds different pages.

## Address it

```ts
import { create } from "@agntn/web";

const marginalia = await create("marginalia"); // MARGINALIA_API_KEY, or the shared "public" key
const results = await marginalia.search("rust async", { maxResults: 20 });
```

The key goes in the `API-Key` header on `api2.marginalia-search.com`. Without `MARGINALIA_API_KEY` the adapter sends `public`, the key Marginalia hands out for trying the API.

## When does it run without a key?

Only when you ask for it by name, `create("marginalia")` or `--provider marginalia`. Automatic selection and `provider: "all"` skip it until `MARGINALIA_API_KEY` is set, so nobody's queries start going to a new host just because they upgraded. With the key set it joins the detection order right after Mojeek.

## What it reads

<table>
<thead>
  <tr>
    <th>
      Call
    </th>
    
    <th>
      Endpoint
    </th>
  </tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <code>
        search
      </code>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      <code>
        GET /search?query=…&count=…&page=…
      </code>
    </td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
</table>

## What comes back

`url`, `title` and `snippet`, nothing else. Marginalia's answer also has a ranking number, a document format and a count of hits per domain, and all three are left out, so the agent does not pay tokens for them. Paging works through `page`. No domain filters, no date bounds, no categories. A search that asks for them gets them back in `ignoredFilters`.

## Gotchas

- The `public` key has one quota per minute, shared by everybody who uses it. Two calls in a row can already get `429 QPM Limit Exceeded`, which comes back as a `RateLimitError` and moves the fallback chain on.
- Results under a free key are licensed CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. A free key of your own comes by email to Marginalia, commercial use needs a paid key.
- `count` goes up to 100, a bigger `maxResults` is clamped to that.
- The answer says how many pages there are and the page after the last one comes back empty, so the continuation stops at `pages`.

## Where it lives

`src/providers/marginalia.ts`.


## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://web.agntn.dev/sitemap.md) for all pages.