a search over Marginalia for your agentic ducklings
Marginalia MCP server exists for a simple reason — assistants are far more useful when they can act on Marginalia directly instead of describing what you should do. a search over Marginalia for your agentic ducklings.
An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that provides access to Marginalia Search, a search engine focused on finding non-commercial content and hidden gems of the internet.
Once Marginalia is connected, these are the calls the assistant has available:
search — Search the web using Marginalia Search with the following parameters:You will need one environment variable: MARGINALIA_API_KEY. The server will not start without them, which is usually why the tools fail to appear on a first run. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.
Installation goes through your MCP client rather than a global install: point it at npm on npm and it is fetched when the client starts. The copy-paste blocks for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are further down this page.
Among the developer tooling options, the useful question is rarely "what can it do" but "what does it cost you to run" — permissions, credentials, and how much of your context its toolset consumes. Marginalia's toolset — search — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by bmorphism; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.
SyncDev reviews every entry in this directory against the project's own documentation before publishing, and revisits them as servers change.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| search | Search the web using Marginalia Search with the following parameters: |
{
"mcpServers": {
"marginalia": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "npm"],
"env": {
"MARGINALIA_API_KEY": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| MARGINALIA_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
The simplest web tool that matters — fetch any URL and get model-ready markdown back.
Industrial-strength web extraction — render, scrape, crawl and search entire sites into clean markdown.
Puppeteer-powered browser control that drives pages from the accessibility tree instead of pixels.
Search built for AI, not humans — semantic web search that returns model-ready content, plus code context.
Answers, not links — delegate questions to Perplexity's search-grounded models and get cited responses back.
Put 6,000+ pre-built scrapers at your assistant's fingertips through one MCP endpoint.