A great use for reddit is the ability to search posts and opinions about any niche topic. Will that be possible with Lemmy as it grows? Will I be able to Google “instant rice Lemmy” and get a comprehensive tier list of each brand?

I imagine search engines will have trouble with all the different instances(?). EDIT: Especially with instances that don’t have Lemmy in their name, I don’t think search engines would return them for Lemmy searches?

  • marsara9@lemmy.world
    21·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • mookulator@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Can’t emphasize enough how important this is for the growth of Lemmy. Many people I know only access Reddit through google searches.

      • marsara9@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • QuinicV@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      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!

      • marsara9@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        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…

    • PierreKanazawa@fedia.io
      1·
      1 year ago

      Tried it, pretty cool, though seems still depend on search engines’ indexing. The instance that I’m on seems not indexed.

      Also it’s interesting it uses intext to identify whether the results are from fediverse.

  • OsakaWilson@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      It’s certainly not going anywhere unless they end up selling it to someone who shuts it down and uses the posts and links as SEO boosting.

    • QuinicV@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      1 year ago

      I imagine that would be quite inconvenient… Especially as Lemmy grows and has potentially many more instances.

      • subtext@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • qwamqwamqwam@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • IMongoose@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      I got one. The Google link brought me to the instance though and not the thread. I was able to find the thread though, so it kinda worked.

  • krigo666@lemmy.world
    31·
    1 year ago

    I think it is preferable to ask other search engines like DuckDuckGo to index Lemmy info. Google is full of garbage.

  • thingsiplay@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    @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.

    • QuinicV@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • ghariksforge@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • static@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      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?