The URL obfuscation and redirect links are an emergency anti-scraping measure to make the search results less palatable to the bots. It's triggered when there's a sustained search rate of more than 5 queries per second, which is like 3x baseline traffic.
Was seeing upwards of 160 searches per second from bots the other week so I put this in to try to dissuade them.
Sep 8, 2026, 2:50 PM@marginalia @hvdsomp Nice to see the actual answer thanks
@marginalia Thanks for the clarification! Makes total sense. And thanks, especially, for creating this search engine. I did a vanity search. Obviously I did. And found a vast collection of results referring to stuff I had long forgotten about. And that don’t show up in any mainstream search engine. Quite amazing. Thank you!
@hvdsomp Cool!
Also fwiw, if it gets annoying you can try https://old-search.marginalia.nu/ -- it's the old UI for the search engine and for some reason isn't hit as hard as the main website, so there's less aggressive anti-bot stuff enabled over there for the most part.
