One thing Reddit dominates on is search results. I’m looking things up and seeing so many links to reddit, which I guess is going to help keep that place relevant (unless those subreddits stay dark).
I wondered how Lemmy and this fed thingy stuff all works for that? With more posts can we expect to see people arriving through search results?
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One thing to keep in mind is that Google currently penalizes links that don’t end in the common top domains like “.com”, “.org” and similar. So something like lemmy.world, if indexed, will rank lower than a site ending in .com with the same keyword density.
Google went from being the most important website on the internet to being more and more useless, it’s amazing seeing such a massive company go downhill. But they have so much money that they’ll be able to stay big forever from capital alone.
What do you use as a search engine instead of Google? I feel like I’ve tried everything, but always end up back at Google search.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now, the results still aren’t as good as google, but not having to look at ads and the better privacy outweigh that for me. It really has improved a lot over the last few years.
Been using Ecosia and so far its been very good. I did not have a need to use Google once.
Let Google be irrelevant. It kind of already is there in the absence of Reddit.
The nerds always blaze a trail when boring old entrenched media ruins good things. In this case the thing being ruined is a search engine that makes the critical mistake of assuming a traditionally “prestigious” .com equates value. Fuck the old establishment, it’s time to ditch decrepit big tech and remake the internet the way it was meant to be. It’s time to reinvent how we share and discover content.
My guess is just that Reddit happily lets search engines crawl it, so that content is well-indexed, and because Reddit threads are often linked to from elsewhere the site is considered good quality.
I’d imagine Lemmy would eventually get to the same point naturally if enough information is shared here. At least, assuming it doesn’t block search engines.
Hmm although I don’t really understand how federation will fit with that, given it basically means the same content is duplicated on a bunch of domains.
Yeah I think it will happen but maybe more slowly. From a search engine’s perspective it is combing results for a particular site, so search results will be shown that way. However, it seems that this would also mean that the same post would be found across multiple sites, which I can only see as a good thing in terms of searchability. Looking for some old obscure post on reddit? The results are only going to come from one site. Same kind of search on Lemmy? Search results could show pages of results of the same post but on several different sites. I’d think that would actually boost the efficacy of searching Lemmy.
Also site search features like googling “site:lemmy.one [search terms]” would still allow you to search just on one site at a time, returning deeper results.
One would hope! I can find results from lemmy instances on Google - they are definitely crawling them, but their page rank is going to start out very low.
There’s a lot of things that factor into the answer, but I think overall it’s gonna be pretty random. Some instances are on domains without “Lemmy” in the name, some don’t include “Lemmy” in the site name configuration, and in the case of some like my own instance, I set the
X-Robots-Tagresponse header such that search engines that properly honor the header won’t crawl or index content on my instance. I’ve actually taken things a step further with mine and put all public paths except for the API endpoints behind authentication (so that Lemmy clients and federation still work with it), so you can’t browse my instance content without going through a proper client for extra privacy. But that goes off-topic.Reddit was centralized so could be optimized for SEO. Lemmy instances are individually run with different configuration at the infrastructure level and the application configuration level, which if most people leave things fairly vanilla, should result in pretty good discovery of Lemmy content across most of these kinds of instances, but I would think most people technical enough to host their own instances would have deviated from defaults and (hopefully) implemented some hardening, which would likely mess with SEO.
So yeah, expect it to be pretty random, but not necessarily unworkable.
I guess you’d have to try it out, right? Maybe look up some topics and point Google to Lemmy. Honestly haven’t looked much into the whole community beyond setting up a Mastodon account a while back and looking into it a bit more this week.
I usually don’t see lemmy on search engines, sadly.
Would be cool to have a browser extension that can return searched terms from fediverse sources that you choose.
Actually the point is that, if someone searched internet for ‘fediverse sources’ they wouldn’t find a relevant thread on lemmy.world, or lemmy.ml, or whatever.
They need to make this a thing.
One thing I’d love to see and would probably help quite a lot with searchability is to have blog and CMS software, instead of having dedicated comment system, integrate a “discuss on Fediverse” button.
It could bring up possible communities based on blogpost/article tags. And since Lemmy supports pingbacks the system would know about the discussion threads and it could even show few last posts from each.
To me it seems like win/win situation for all parties involved.
There’s an issue on GitHub about the topic https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1285
Unfortunately Lemmy isn’t great for SEO because lemmy-ui heavily relies on JavaScript to render the page, which search bots avoid.
A lot of search engines rely on backlinks to rank the reliablitly/validity of a site so even if a given instance was picked up to have enough places reference it to be seen as a valid source would ve a pretty heavy lift.
I actually added a custom search engine to Firefox… so I can search something on Lemmy. I have the keyword ‘LW’ for Lemmy.World search right now (because Lemmy.ml was offline a while).
Basically, do the Lemmy search (search term
ssss) then edit/replacessss>%sand copy the entire link.https://lemmy.world/search/q/%s/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1Then using ‘add custom search engine’ extension on Firefox, you add it.
