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I'm working on a specialized search engine just for the fediverse. https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search
If anyone wants to help out, feel free to reach out, but I hope to have something ready to release soon.
The idea with my version is that it'll search as much of Lemmy / the fediverse as it can and you can select the preferred instance that you want to open any link with.
If you are looking to return relevant, well ranked results based on freeform queries you'd be better indexing into something like elasticsearch. Otherwise you'll be reinventing solutions to well understood problems, like stemming as a very basic example.
For the initial release the search is still fairly basic, but A LOT better than the built in search here.
Right now I just look for IF the individual words match ANY of the words in the post title or body and then rank based on the number of upvotes that the post has.
Future versions may look at using elastic search, etc... But for MVP it just looks for the number of hits + the score of the post as I assume the higher the score the more trustworthy the post, and obviously the more matches that to your query the more relevant the post is.
I’ve been testing this and it’s the real deal!
How is this different from just searching for posts on the original "seed instance"? Presumably you're crawling through everything on all of the instances that it's aware of, as opposed to the Lemmy built-in search which would only search communities that have a subscriber?
Search isn't working well for me at all, I never find anything.
So the built in search here is VERY basic and slow. For example if I search for "How this is" it wouldn't find your comment here as the word order has to match as well.
One of my main goals is that you'll be able to use my search engine like you would Google's + adding reddit to the end of the query. Then from the search results the link you open would open in your preferred instance instead of the instance Google happened to crawl. Lastly if you want to Google Lemmy posts today you have to add every known Lemmy instance to your search query and even then Google still will open the link on whichever instance it happened to find it on rather than the instance you have an account on.
I recently saw that someone was making a keyword search engine that works across the fediverse. I'll try to find the project.
edit: found it, unsurprisingly it's called lemmy-search. Although it only seems to work on Lemmy instances.
That's cool, but OP is specifically asking about finding things on Google.
"...or other search engines?"
Yeah I meant just a neat way of searching for user posts.
Google probably ingrained a little so that's what I gravitate to, but if there are better ways of searching that's helpful too. Having a search engine do it is good because you might come across old forum posts as well as Reddit, but over the years Reddit just became more prevalent. Obviously these new federated sites won't yet have all the usable content, but I'm wondering if the process will be the same once they do.
Honestly if this gets as popular as reddit, it would be better than Google eventually.
True. But I appreciated the FYI.
Google gutted their search over last few years.
No, sandar I don't want 69 pages of SEO optimized trash
They're getting indexed, but search rankings are so low they're buried. If you put <search term> site:<server> you get post results. For example lemmy site:lemmy.world
You can also put site:lemmy.* and it’ll pick up some too.
First we need to offer google competitive answers to reddits. Then it will consider indexing us.
We could just pay Google. How else do you think scam sites keep appearing at the top of Google searches
Not the way Google works. It's probably indexing most medium size instances and up. They just need to get better Pagerank along with the other metrics google uses now to show up more prominently
For example https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reddit%20site%3Akbin.social
Yes, but Google annoyingly "corrects" every feddit.* searchterm to reddit
Would this be corrected naturally by people using feddit as a search term more or does google have to manually patch this things?
I guess, but it's highly unlikely that "vlemmy.net" or "feddit.de" will be more searched than Reddit.com in the next time
It will be corrected over time, I presume automatically. I was one of the first people with a Steam Deck and when I searched for things Google would "helpfully" autocorrect to StreamDeck. But eventually Google figured it out.
I don't know about others but I used to just add "reddit" to each of my searches. Wouldn't adding "Lemmy" instead do the same thing eventually?
The problem is I don't know if it would pull instances that don't contain Lemmy in the name.
If it became a common enough thing to search for, Google would correct for that and start ranking Lemmy instances higher, regardless of what’s in the name.
As a newcomer, I've visited 3 Lemmy sites: Beehaw. Lemmy.world, and a custom instance. I noticed that they each have page footers that contain: Join Lemmy. If the same is true of many Lemmy instances, I can add Lemmy (or, with quotation marks, "Join Lemmy") in a Google query. — (Note: Top matches might not always be best matches on the originating instance, or sometimes the best matches might be hidden until I click "repeat the search with the omitted results included." And of course sometimes I won't get any match because the target hasn't been indexed by Google.)
Adding “join lemmy” is really smart.
Or other federated content on other platforms.
I guess you would need the name of the instance where the community resides. But usually if you search about specific questions the site with the information will appear (be it reddit or some lemmy instances) without adding it to the search term
The issue is google for the last few years has been prioritising businesses and services with really good SEO. And ads.
So in order to find helpful user content I always had to add Reddit to the search query.
Is there any reason the site: syntax can't be used? For example: Musk site:feddit.de
That's what I did, see the search term in the search field
I don't understand. I looked at your screenshot again and the search field seems to show feddit.de: Musk. This is not the site: syntax. What I suggested was Musk site:feddit.de. Am I missing something?
The site: is feddit.de: and after that follows the search query. It works that way too, and it's less work to type. Try it out by yourself
I tried it myself and they're not similar at all. site: is handled specially through Google's advanced search syntax while the other approach is no different from a normal keyword. Please refer to the below images with attention to the result counts:
It's fine if you don't want to use the syntax, but using it would solve your problem with keyword autocorrect and properly filter your results to only the website you've asked for.
You are right. My apologies
I think OP is asking about a broader, Fediverse-scaled search. So using the site: search tag will only search a single Lemmy instance. I don't think Google will index cross-instance content in those searches, otherwise it'll end up with a ton of duplicate results. So if what you're looking for was actually posted to a different instance, it may not be found with that search.
I'm just theorizing, though, since this is all still really new and untested.
Why are people using a site named after the place they purposefully left with just one letter changed?
Presumably because reddit itself has a lot of positivity and memories attached to it for a lot of people - it wasn't the site that people wanted to leave, but rather the ceo and staff behind it.
Feddit is the name of a Lemmy/kbin style federated instance.
This would obviously be good for promoting Lemmy which I’m 100% all for.
But from a privacy point of view, I also feel mods should be able to stop indexing or choose which engines can index for their specific communities and also users at a user should be able to control it. I understand that engines could ignore this, but I doubt the big ones would..
I think I read that individual instances already can choose whether to be indexed or not, I could be wrong there
Being decentralized will make it harder to just use "search + reddit" because you don't know if it's "search + lemmy.world" or "search + beehaw" or "search + kbin." Also, each admin is in charge of their own Robots.txt.
Does fediverse instances even show up in search engines?
There is no money for parasites here so I wouldn't expect them to send anyone here.
They can. For Mastodon there's an option for "Opt-out of search engine indexing" which adds a "noindex" tag to your profile which Google respects. Not all indexers respect the tag however and "noindex" data isn't federated which can cause your replies to show up: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22047