Lemmy

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What are your thoughts on Lemmy's current search functionality? (lemm.ee)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Do you think it works okay, at least so far as local/federated communities go? What are some adjustments you might like to see to it?

Personally, I still find the dropdown/search combination somewhat unintuitive and at times it can feel clunky, although it has definitely improved. I sort of think a regular search bar to filter through communities/posters might be better, with a separate dropdown beneath or next to the bar, so one knows one can directly search by community/username, but I can see why it was done the way it was to a degree.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

It's okay. I usually use https://lemmyverse.net/communities as a complement if I want to research communities

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It has worked okay for me. I haven't tested this out in detail, but like strings didn't seem to work like how I expect. There seemed to be a lot of unrelated results where the string is taken as a Boolean OR set of arguments. Like searching for "AI (term)" mostly generates results for words that contain "ai" like "contains, again, etc." That can make contextual detailed searches impractical or force more creative single word searches and poor overall results utility.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Works great for me!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Imo, it kinda sucks, but it works. I think there's bigger fish to fry, so search really isn't something I think should be prioritized.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I want to be able to search my own comments. Sometimes I want to pull up an old comment to prove I said/didn't say something or find a meme that I posted awhile ago. Being able to search other user's comments though would be kind of eeeeh, might be used for harassment.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You can do both of these on the search page by filtering by creator.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Huh, neat. So that's what that option is for.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

There would also probably be an easy way to add this as a shortcut on your profile page too, IE to search all your content. Someone would have to open up an issue on the lemmy-ui github for that tho.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

tip-top

A+

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

The search is abmyssal in my opinion. I can't reliably paste links I've found elsewhere — always have to manually change it to match the expected community syntax. I only every use it if I have to, and then I resort to search for the community of interest, and use the community view to find a post I'm looking for. Not suited for discovery in my experience.

It may have improved lately though, I wouldn't know since I'm not using it much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I use search from within an app, which makes the experience a bit better. The search UI on web is too messy IMO