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So I've been working on a solution for this.
As I see it Google and others are going to have a hard if not impossible time to incorporate the fediverse, and the fact that the same content can exist on multiple servers.
So I'm working on a search engine specifically build, for Lemmy at least. Where it'll take you to whatever your preferred instance is when tapping on a search result.
I hope to have a MVP up and running in a few more days.
Can’t emphasize enough how important this is for the growth of Lemmy. Many people I know only access Reddit through google searches.
Yep and I'm one of them. Go look me up on Reddit and I think I have maybe 20 posts over the 14+ years I was on the site. ...joined Lemmy and immediately got frustrated that I couldn't find anything. So I figured I take a crack at it. Especially since I couldn't see how Google would ever be able to link me to my instance. Let alone make it easy to search the entire fediverse without having to write out every possible site, with new ones popping up every day.
Please pop a reminder here. Commenting for a bump.
Search their name on GitHub and you'll find it. Star it to follow.
If this guy changes the internet include me in the screenshot.
I’ll invest in seed funding stage. 😂
Interesting. I hadn't even thought about how the fact that instance1.[post] and instance2.[post@instance1] is essentially the same thing and how search engines would handle it. Interested in what you come up with!
Thanks. If you do some digging you can find the project on GitHub but note that it's a work in progress still. The UI is lacking and it's rough around the edges but it's "working". And I still need to do some optimizations on the crawler itself, etc....
It's also going to be completely self-hostable just like Lemmy, etc...
I can see this being helpful
(commenting so I can bookmark)
IDK, isn't it the same for reddit? It also encourages crossposting, so the same content is on there several times. Maybe I don't understand the fediverse well enough yet, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
The mastodon crowd was verry anti on search engines, and killed projects like this.
But yea, do it! I think the lemmy/kbin crowd would mostly like it
Ya I only index Lemmy instances, for now. Mastodon and other ActivityPub servers may be in the future, but ActivityPub has some limitations so I'm stuck using the Lemmy-specific APIs.
we need a search engine for the entire fediverse, it would be a game changer
I am surprised noone mentioned https://fedi-search.com . It's working pretty well. Full credit to Benjamin Pryor for this
You can use a search query to include only results with Lemmy's footer, which is consistent across all Lemmy instances. I made a post about it here: https://lemmy.world/post/342365
EDIT: Fixed link
You formatted your link wrong. here is the correctly formatted link
The label field is for what we will see. And the URL field is the actual link.
The markdown syntax is [link label](actual link)
Also: You can always paste links without formatting https://lemmy.world/post/342365
If Lemmy becomes a source of enough information like Reddit is, search engines will index it. SEO is a marketing thing, and a place like Lemmy doesn't really need that. Google, DDG, etc. all put engineering effort into making sure sites with lots of information are indexed and available in their search results.
In the future they eventually might be, for some instances. Though definitely not for all of them, since some of the instances might disable indexing.
I've actually already seen a few Lemmy results (lemmy.ml) in Google searches, the trouble is it doesn't link to individual posts, just the community so it's not particularly useful. So it definitely is possible, just needs to be improved to be able to index posts.
It’s up to the individual instance owner and Lemmy the software itself enabling SEO. It’s just getting started now so it will be long time before that.
likely not THAT long. I'm sure things are already being crawled
Digg.com was the big thing with Reddit trailing. Digg began tweaking the experience toward a more profitable model. I had already come to Reddit when they went too far and there was a sudden enormous migration from Digg to Reddit. Digg went from being THE social media aggregator to being nothing in a matter of weeks.
Reddit is more deeply rooted, so I think it will stick around, I'm cool if Reddit keeps those who are happy with corporate model busy so we can do our thing here.
I think it is preferable to ask other search engines like DuckDuckGo to index Lemmy info. Google is full of garbage.
Brave Search would be better, they have a dedicated section on the results page for discussions.
Depends on Google. These tech companies don't like new platforms, especially those competing with established ones like Reddit. You'll see that Google often discriminates against Lemmy or Mastodon.
Respectfully: Fuck that.
If you want to find the best instant rice recommendations on Lemmy, Lemmy should have a functional post search function, rather than me relying on a malevolent corporate entity like google to index all the content.
Search has gone to shit as the Internet has embraced social media sites, an upside of this is that wikipedia+Lemmy+key word search, mayas accurate as asking Google Bard or bing, and they can be built on entirety open tech.
Cool rage but you dismissing search indexing is kinda hilarious. It's not going away and it's what makes the web. Would you rather have 3 big websites instead of indexed web?
I came here to say something similar but you put it nicely.
@QuinicV Why would it not be possible? It depends on the software, if all text is open to be indexed. Kbin and Lemmy instances are basically open forum software and are indexed by search engines. You can test it in Google or other engines by forcing to search on the site only with site:lemmy.world are posts indexed? , which would be an empty search result if they were locked down like discord content.
But what if the post I'm searching for is not on lemmy.world? Say the instance doesn't even have Lemmy in their name, like beehaw.org. How would a search engine index it? How would it know it's part of Lemmy?
There will be links to everything somewhere. The same way you knew to get the cave in the same way you know to get to Lemmy. There are already links that have been posted to Reddit that are in archives that are easily followable. Google doesn't just search one or two things they search all the links to the things and then the links from those things to other things. If Google can't figure out how to get to it chances are you don't know it's there either.
This is a case for search engine optimization or SEO. Including keywords and tags in your robots.txt is an important part of making sure you exist to the rest of the internet if you want to be findable via search engine. "Lemmy" as a term will almost certainly be one of the standard tags applied to any instance that knows even slightly what they're doing or else has been prepared a tutorial by someone who does. I also expect terms like "beehaw" and whatever other large servers prove themselves popular and robust enough to stand the test of time.
Reddit did not start out as the thing to google, it's 15+ years old, only in the last 5y I started prefixing my google searches with reddit.
I actually found Reddit by googling things. I had seen it 5 or 6 times over a few years, and eventually I just went to the main site. I might have even used Reddit in the search before I joined. Regardless, I had recognized that all the best answers for tricky problems that I had were coming from Reddit before I even joined 11 years ago.
Everyone's experience on this will be different, but I personally started using reddit about 12 years or so ago largely because at that point a lot of my Google searches were already pointing me towards reddit. I wasn't necessarily going to google specifically to find reddit results, but since that's where I kept ending up i figured I might as well go straight to reddit. And since reddit's search function is and has always been trash, i pretty much immediately started using Google to search reddit.
I have seen at least one user claim they got a result from lemmy when searching a question on google. YMMV though. Lemmy is a fraction of the size of reddit, it will take time for posts to reach the level that google starts indexing them specifically.
I would argue that eventually, yes, one will be able to google search Lemmy just like Reddit.
I wish there was a way to get an entire Reddit archive over here. Realistically I'm still going to have to search Reddit because it has 10+ years of answers to obscure questions.
Basically use <query> site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:beehaw.org OR site:kbin.social (or whatever main instances you want to hit)
You can also use this for custom browser search keys like the following https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+site%3Alemmy.world+OR+site%3Alemmyml+OR+site%3Abeehaw.org+OR+site%3Akbin.social
I imagine that would be quite inconvenient... Especially as Lemmy grows and has potentially many more instances.
I believe that DDG has a shorthand for site:Reddit (without the .com). If lemmy gets popular enough DDG may implement a similar shorthand that incorporates the fediverse without us having to use a massive string. Like if it gets big enough, we may not have to solve this problem because others will see the value in making it easy.
That’s my hope at least.
You just need to backlink to Lemmy from an already known websites and the crawlers will find their way.
See: https://backlinko.com/link-building-strategies
About the search engine to dispaly the correct instance, that is something I don't think that works now and would require optimizations.
I have been finding some!
Lemmy is not as unique as Reddit as a word. I get a lot of Lemmy Kilmister matches. But still hopeful
Use the exclusion keyword for your search provider. For example on google lemmy -kilmister -motorhead will get you only Lemmy software results by excluding pages with "kilmister" or "motorhead" in their contents.
Correct me if I’m wrong but if individual admins allow their instances to be indexed wouldn’t the instance itself have some sort of metadata identifying it as a Lemmy branch?
It's a difficult problem but not principly impossible. One potentially good thing about Meta being involved is that if the user base is there, I'm pretty sure Google with their resources and other big tech backing will find a way and incorporate it into their engine.