One of the best things about reddit was looking for answers or other users with the same problem as you, and since Google didn’t really help with that anymore and instead insisted on giving you business results, the best practice was to put your search terms in followed by ‘reddit’ and you’d find your answer.

  • marsara9@lemmy.world
    622·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • qisope@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • marsara9@lemmy.world
        6·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Confetti@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      Some name ideas off the top of my head if you would like some:

      • Findmmy (find me)
      • lemscover
      • discovermmy (discover me)
      • Lemlens
      • Seachiverse
      • Findiverse
      • Fedisearch (I like this one) taken sadly

      Edit: please ignore if I posted multiple times something weird is going on haha

      • marsara9@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        If Kbin federates with the “seed” Lemmy server it’ll pick up the posts that way, but at the moment you’ll only be able to open links to Lemmy instances.

        In the future I hope to have it working with Kbin and others as well.

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
    411·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
    35·
    1 year ago

    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

  • marcar@lemmy.world
    151·
    1 year ago

    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

  • sadreality@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.