Duckduckgo has a bang for Mastodon: !msocial. Maybe we should start putting in requests for Fediverse bangs: !lemmy, !kbin, !beehaw, etc.
It would be better if they would add !fediverse that searches all of the sites. Maybe one day!
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Being able to easily search the entire fediverse woule be amazing.
I assume msocial only searches mastodon.social?
looks like it. !msocial {{{string}} points to https://mastodon.social/tags/string. So, !msocial Cats searches https://mastodon.social/tags/Cats.
Very cool, I didn't know they added !msocial.
Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.
I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.
On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots...?
I just requested a !kbin bang. In the request form they ask for a search URL such as https://kbin.social/search?q={{{s}}}. I tested it and it worked on kbin. I am thinking that the more people request these bangs the more likely they get approved.
I'll try submitting the same, sure.
I am suspicious that the search URL will only be indexing kbin.social and not the greater kbin/lemmy universe which is not good. But it's a !kbin bang and the !msocial bang goes to mastodon.social so I guess it makes sense.
I'd much rather see a !kbin search that returned results from all kbin instances it has indexed, and a !lemmy search that does the same for lemmy instances, or a !fediforum search that returned results from both. But it's a start!
If you use firefox, you can use extensions to add any lemmy instances as a search engine options. Then, simply add an @ shortcut to the lemmy search engine options, and you'll have the ddg equivalent of bangs in your firefox search bar.
Firefox does allow you to change search engine straight from the search bar by typing @ shortcut. An example of this by default, typing @ddg on firefox makes you search with duckduckgo instead of your default search engine.
Keep in mind that you have to type the shortcut on the searchbar first, before typing anything else.
Only downside is you won't find stuff from domains without lemmy in them, e.g. feddit.de
There's a silver lining here. It will prompt people to search from their instance instead of giving more traffic to Google.
Wouldn't the search results be even more limited in that case, though?
lemmy.* doesn't work for beehaw.org anyway
Sorry, working example would be:
-site:lemmy.lm
Sorry,
correct example might have been ~~-site:lemmy.lm~~
-site:lemmy.ml
@edit: corrected domain thank You @[email protected]
Someperson shall createth a copypasta of these terms of search that shall be needed to search on ALL of the kingdom of lemmy and associates. Until then let us pray that answered questions and questioned answers shall not disappear in the never ending greatness that is lemmy, as information shall be needed as needed shall be information!
Every browser supports adding custom search engines to the list. So you can prepare a query with all terms to be added and save it as a search engine. Fediverse search based on Google/Bing
Hmm, thank You for nice idea, maybe python(or JXS)+selenium+https://browse.feddit.de+https://programmablesearchengine.google.com could give me what I need,
I should look in to that, tnx
Also lemm.ee
Somebody posted a tool that handles this sort of searching for a number of popular instances that do not fit the usual patterns, see https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/52753
Don't forget to add -motorhead as well ;)
Unless, you know, you're awesome.
Finding answers about Lemmy is an easy, 3 step process:
- Enter search query, followed by Lemmy
- Exasperated sigh, because apparently I haven't learned my lesson
- Enter search query followed by "Lemmy -motorhead"
YSK: This doesn’t work in DuckDuckGo because I just independently had the idea to try this a few days ago and returned no results. I didn’t think to try on Google. I believe DuckDuckGo is running on Microsoft Bing so it likely doesn’t work there either
On DuckDuckGo you can use:
!g site: lemmy.*
to be redirected to an anonymous Google search
it's not "an anonymous Google search", just a regular Google search results page. they got rid of encrypted.google years ago.
Is there such thing as an anonymous Google search though?
startpage.com
You should use !s instead to search google anonymously.
Not all lemmy sites fit that though. You've already lost out on sh.itjust.works, beehaw, lem.ee, sopuli.xyz etc
OP is sharing a very useful tip for people new to the Fediverse. Let's not allow our pedantry to get in the way of what is still a helpful tip please.
Fwiw I don't think they were complaining. I found it useful to clarify that it's not a complete search.
I frequently append "Reddit" to searches for more informative results. I can imagine that in the future it would be great do perform simalr searches covering all of the fediverse
I don't see how my comment "gets in the way" of using it. Just something to be aware of.
Cool. Had no idea that wildcards work
You can also search for text that is present on most Lemmy pages and in URLs like:
"Join Lemmy" inurl:post
I've had better results searching through the instances themselves because Google doesn't always index the keywords on time. On caveat of this method is that if the instance doesn't have the syncing out the instance where the info is from being propagated, then this trick would not work
But will it omit other things like kbin.social?
probably. So you could add it as a site search string; such as: site:lemmy.* OR site:kbin.social -site:beehaw.org cats
Yes and no. It won't search kbin.social directly, but federation works via mirroring content, so any posts that have reached the site being searched will, well, be on the site being searched.
Pretty sure there shouldn’t be a space between the term “site:” and the domain
Sorry missed that in preview
So this is a good idea in principle, but there are a lot of sites that don't follow the "lemmy.tld" format. I checked the list of instances connected to our site, lemmy.ninja. We've been up for a few days, so we've accumulated a lot of instances by now. Following the Lemmy.* format gave me 285 out of 585 of our current instances. So just under 50%.
@[email protected] pointed out here why it may not really matter too much. As long as everything is pretty well cross pollinated, things should be discoverable. I imagine the bigger the user base the better it will be.
Also won't work for kbin.social.
I feel like I didn't think about this while creating my instance
If I'm searching for something I will always use "quotes" to make sure I get a direct search for that term. Anything else is a waste of time
There's also https://fedi-search.com/ that searches a bunch of the larger instances if you don't want to type a bunch of stuff in.
Thank You, UI looks great
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