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.
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.
Some name ideas off the top of my head if you would like some:
Fedisearch (I like this one)taken sadlyEdit: please ignore if I posted multiple times something weird is going on haha
Best one I heard so far has just been “Lemmy Search” or “Let me Search”.
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Does it only index Lemmy instances? What about kbin and others?
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.