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So I've been working on a solution for this.
As I see it Google and others are going to have a hard if not impossible time to incorporate the fediverse, and the fact that the same content can exist on multiple servers.
So I'm working on a search engine specifically build, for Lemmy at least. Where it'll take you to whatever your preferred instance is when tapping on a search result.
I hope to have a MVP up and running in a few more days.
Can’t emphasize enough how important this is for the growth of Lemmy. Many people I know only access Reddit through google searches.
Yep and I'm one of them. Go look me up on Reddit and I think I have maybe 20 posts over the 14+ years I was on the site. ...joined Lemmy and immediately got frustrated that I couldn't find anything. So I figured I take a crack at it. Especially since I couldn't see how Google would ever be able to link me to my instance. Let alone make it easy to search the entire fediverse without having to write out every possible site, with new ones popping up every day.
Please pop a reminder here. Commenting for a bump.
Search their name on GitHub and you'll find it. Star it to follow.
Can the reminder bots be migrated too?
Interesting. I hadn't even thought about how the fact that instance1.[post] and instance2.[post@instance1] is essentially the same thing and how search engines would handle it. Interested in what you come up with!
Thanks. If you do some digging you can find the project on GitHub but note that it's a work in progress still. The UI is lacking and it's rough around the edges but it's "working". And I still need to do some optimizations on the crawler itself, etc....
It's also going to be completely self-hostable just like Lemmy, etc...
I can see this being helpful
(commenting so I can bookmark)
IDK, isn't it the same for reddit? It also encourages crossposting, so the same content is on there several times. Maybe I don't understand the fediverse well enough yet, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
we need a search engine for the entire fediverse, it would be a game changer
Shit dude, that'd be a sweet little tool.
This would be awesome!
I am surprised noone mentioned https://fedi-search.com . It's working pretty well. Full credit to Benjamin Pryor for this
Digg.com was the big thing with Reddit trailing. Digg began tweaking the experience toward a more profitable model. I had already come to Reddit when they went too far and there was a sudden enormous migration from Digg to Reddit. Digg went from being THE social media aggregator to being nothing in a matter of weeks.
Reddit is more deeply rooted, so I think it will stick around, I'm cool if Reddit keeps those who are happy with corporate model busy so we can do our thing here.
It's certainly not going anywhere unless they end up selling it to someone who shuts it down and uses the posts and links as SEO boosting.
You can use a search query to include only results with Lemmy's footer, which is consistent across all Lemmy instances. I made a post about it here: https://lemmy.world/post/342365
I think it is preferable to ask other search engines like DuckDuckGo to index Lemmy info. Google is full of garbage.
Brave Search would be better, they have a dedicated section on the results page for discussions.
Depends on Google. These tech companies don't like new platforms, especially those competing with established ones like Reddit. You'll see that Google often discriminates against Lemmy or Mastodon.
Respectfully: Fuck that.
If you want to find the best instant rice recommendations on Lemmy, Lemmy should have a functional post search function, rather than me relying on a malevolent corporate entity like google to index all the content.
Search has gone to shit as the Internet has embraced social media sites, an upside of this is that wikipedia+Lemmy+key word search, mayas accurate as asking Google Bard or bing, and they can be built on entirety open tech.
Cool rage but you dismissing search indexing is kinda hilarious. It's not going away and it's what makes the web. Would you rather have 3 big websites instead of indexed web?
I came here to say something similar but you put it nicely.
Maybe, but probable Google try to kill us
I would argue that eventually, yes, one will be able to google search Lemmy just like Reddit.
I wish there was a way to get an entire Reddit archive over here. Realistically I'm still going to have to search Reddit because it has 10+ years of answers to obscure questions.
In the future they eventually might be, for some instances. Though definitely not for all of them, since some of the instances might disable indexing.
I've actually already seen a few Lemmy results (lemmy.ml) in Google searches, the trouble is it doesn't link to individual posts, just the community so it's not particularly useful. So it definitely is possible, just needs to be improved to be able to index posts.
Basically use <query> site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:beehaw.org OR site:kbin.social (or whatever main instances you want to hit)
You can also use this for custom browser search keys like the following https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+site%3Alemmy.world+OR+site%3Alemmyml+OR+site%3Abeehaw.org+OR+site%3Akbin.social
I imagine that would be quite inconvenient... Especially as Lemmy grows and has potentially many more instances.
I believe that DDG has a shorthand for site:Reddit (without the .com). If lemmy gets popular enough DDG may implement a similar shorthand that incorporates the fediverse without us having to use a massive string. Like if it gets big enough, we may not have to solve this problem because others will see the value in making it easy.
That’s my hope at least.
Reddit did not start out as the thing to google, it's 15+ years old, only in the last 5y I started prefixing my google searches with reddit.
I actually found Reddit by googling things. I had seen it 5 or 6 times over a few years, and eventually I just went to the main site. I might have even used Reddit in the search before I joined. Regardless, I had recognized that all the best answers for tricky problems that I had were coming from Reddit before I even joined 11 years ago.
Everyone's experience on this will be different, but I personally started using reddit about 12 years or so ago largely because at that point a lot of my Google searches were already pointing me towards reddit. I wasn't necessarily going to google specifically to find reddit results, but since that's where I kept ending up i figured I might as well go straight to reddit. And since reddit's search function is and has always been trash, i pretty much immediately started using Google to search reddit.
Ok, not a stupid question - but annoying to assume that only Google is relevant.
Also, annoying that you'll assume that searching 'instant rice' will pull results from Lemmy. Even searching Lemmy for 'instant rice' brings zero results.
So I hope my answer will come up in your next search...
However, searching for 'sending epub files to my kindle' brings up quite a few... and down the list there, we see posts from 2022 in r/kindle, and entering reddit as an extra keyword pulls up more...
So really, we want to know if we search for something which should have results in Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world - and not only Lemmy, there are others - like BeeHaw) how long is it going to take before this gets picked up by SEARCH ENGINES (Let's not say Google, or Reddit - these are bad habits unless there's a specific need to specify).> instant rice
but annoying to assume that only Google is relevant.
Google's market share is around 92%. Of course it's the most relevant thing. Other search engines don't exist for 10% of the users.
You know that Google and Reddit own the internet - so just go there, and make sure you're using a Chromium based browser because that's the market share too.
That way, you can work to create a Fediverse whilst Google and friends succeed in closing all the loops to take total control of your internet and browser.
Other people will say they 'search'.
Part of the marketing strategy is to make Microsoft, Google, Reddit etc the default.
Why reinforce it?
Not specifically to become accessible to Google.
Here's one example of something I found OUTSIDE the fediverse via search.
I use SearXNG, but I remember that one came via Qwant search and NOT via Google.
Language IS very important here, and it's important to avoid always using 'default' branded options which are not and should never be considered the default.
It's a difficult problem but not principly impossible. One potentially good thing about Meta being involved is that if the user base is there, I'm pretty sure Google with their resources and other big tech backing will find a way and incorporate it into their engine.
Correct me if I’m wrong but if individual admins allow their instances to be indexed wouldn’t the instance itself have some sort of metadata identifying it as a Lemmy branch?
I have seen at least one user claim they got a result from lemmy when searching a question on google. YMMV though. Lemmy is a fraction of the size of reddit, it will take time for posts to reach the level that google starts indexing them specifically.
You just need to backlink to Lemmy from an already known websites and the crawlers will find their way.
See: https://backlinko.com/link-building-strategies
About the search engine to dispaly the correct instance, that is something I don't think that works now and would require optimizations.
