It's okay. I usually use https://lemmyverse.net/communities as a complement if I want to research communities
Lemmy
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].
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.
Works great for me!
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.
tip-top
A+
I use search from within an app, which makes the experience a bit better. The search UI on web is too messy IMO
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.