Overview
Marginalia Search is a search crawler from Marginalia used for search indexing, URL discovery, page rendering, result freshness, and search-quality checks.
Its primary user-agent pattern is search.marginalia.nu.
Marginalia Search is Unverified at the identity-evidence level. The listed identity remains useful for detection, but this record does not currently contain authoritative evidence sufficient to authenticate the identity claim.
Robots.txt behavior is not currently confirmed.
Marginalia Search can usually be allowed after confirming the source and monitoring request volume.
Identity
- User-Agent
search.marginalia.nu- HTTP Agent Examples
search.marginalia.nu- Robots.txt Token
search.marginalia.nu- Identity Type
- Observed
- Evidence Method
- Treat `search.marginalia.nu` as an identity signal only. Confirm it with current operator documentation, cryptographic verification, forward-confirmed reverse DNS, source-network ownership, or other authoritative evidence before trusting the claimed identity.
Classification
- Type
- Search
- Kind
- Crawler
- Family
- Marginalia
- Purpose
- indexing
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- Marginalia Search is used for search indexing, URL discovery, page rendering, result freshness, and search-quality checks.
- Detection Notes
- Marginalia Search traffic is primarily detected by the `search.marginalia.nu` user-agent pattern. Compare source IPs, reverse DNS, request paths, and crawl cadence with Marginalia infrastructure before trusting the traffic.
- Respects robots.txt
- Unknown
- Spoofing Risk
- Marginalia Search has medium spoofing risk because user-agent strings can be copied; pair the match with DNS, IP, behavior, or operator evidence.
- Risk
- Safe
- Recommended Handling
- Depends
Rules and controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
# robots.txt behavior is unconfirmed. Do not rely on this rule without verification.