this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
211 points (98.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35944 readers
1951 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] marsara9 96 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

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 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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 8 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I’ve been testing this and it’s the real deal!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Search isn't working well for me at all, I never find anything.

[–] marsara9 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it only index Lemmy instances? What about kbin and others?

[–] marsara9 2 points 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.