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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.
I’ve been testing this and it’s the real deal!
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?
Search isn't working well for me at all, I never find anything.
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.
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.
They're getting indexed, but search rankings are so low they're buried. If you put <search term> site:<server> you get post results. For example lemmy site:lemmy.world
You can also put site:lemmy.* and it’ll pick up some too.
I recently saw that someone was making a keyword search engine that works across the fediverse. I'll try to find the project.
edit: found it, unsurprisingly it's called lemmy-search. Although it only seems to work on Lemmy instances.
That's cool, but OP is specifically asking about finding things on Google.
"...or other search engines?"
Yeah I meant just a neat way of searching for user posts.
Google probably ingrained a little so that's what I gravitate to, but if there are better ways of searching that's helpful too. Having a search engine do it is good because you might come across old forum posts as well as Reddit, but over the years Reddit just became more prevalent. Obviously these new federated sites won't yet have all the usable content, but I'm wondering if the process will be the same once they do.
Honestly if this gets as popular as reddit, it would be better than Google eventually.
True. But I appreciated the FYI.
First we need to offer google competitive answers to reddits. Then it will consider indexing us.
We could just pay Google. How else do you think scam sites keep appearing at the top of Google searches
Not the way Google works. It's probably indexing most medium size instances and up. They just need to get better Pagerank along with the other metrics google uses now to show up more prominently
For example https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reddit%20site%3Akbin.social
This would obviously be good for promoting Lemmy which I’m 100% all for.
But from a privacy point of view, I also feel mods should be able to stop indexing or choose which engines can index for their specific communities and also users at a user should be able to control it. I understand that engines could ignore this, but I doubt the big ones would..
I think I read that individual instances already can choose whether to be indexed or not, I could be wrong there
Being decentralized will make it harder to just use "search + reddit" because you don't know if it's "search + lemmy.world" or "search + beehaw" or "search + kbin." Also, each admin is in charge of their own Robots.txt.
I’ve been experimenting with my instance and google does index my lemmy.mitchday.com page. If you search ‘lemmy mitch day’, you get my page right up top and a few motorhead fans named mitch down below.
My experiment involves trying to SEO a vanity domain I’ve had for years and only used for email. Since July 4, the page ranking for my general site has steadily climbed. The little bit of traffic from other instances and a handful of subscriptions seems to be impacting the ranking.
