NOTE: the late “Lemmy” is a beloved Brit* musician from an enjoyable rock band, perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues? (sorry, I just didn’t know him very well; kinda before my time)
Okay, what I’m trying to explain here is how we search for things and how we find them, particularly when we include the magical word: “Lemmy” in our searches.
For example-- I can just half-awake, lazily type something like “reddit” + search term, and BOOM! Robert’s your avuncular figure.**
Now, by comparison, hopping on an instance, so far I’ve found that searches within the Lemmysphere are remarkably strong. (well, at least for lemm.ee; I love my instance)
Unfortunately, that’s not how most people search and find us, which more typically involves Google, etc.
Hence my question, laddies & lassies-- i.e. is there anything we can do to influence how this search-stuff works…?
* see, I always find a way to relate things back to Europe, haha
** like “there you go,” ie. “Bob’s your uncle,” a classic Brit pub-phrase
Motörhead ≠ Led Zeppelin
Yeah… I love both but Led Zep is way more of a hippie rock vibe and motorhead is like biker rock
You mean that zeppelin was high in the clouds and motorhead are oil heads?
Reddit is all on one domain, so a search on that is a fairly simple thing to do. Lemmy is a lot of different inter-connected sites, most of which don’t even contain “Lemmy” in their name, making it a much more difficult ask.
And to make matters worse, because all of those domains have a good chunk of nearly identical content, they end up appearing like SEO content farm spam to the algorithm. It’s like all those sites that used to clone Stack Overflow back in the day.
Lemmy is a lot of different inter-connected sites, most of which don’t even contain “Lemmy” in their name, making it a much more difficult ask.
A search engine could easily enough set up their own Lemmy server to search from. Same with Mastodon.
A search engine could easily enough set up their own Lemmy server to search from. Same with Mastodon.
Sure, but if Google actually did that, a lot of people here would go apeshit about them profiting from this content.
I’d go apeshit happy that they see us as relevant
I love how reading through this comment thread pretty much follows my internal monologue…
And that’s why it’s so cool that Kagi has an option to limit your search to the fediverse.
“-music” should mostly do the trick… unless you’re looking for music.
Kagi (a paid search engine) has a “fediverse forums” filter option.
And the search actually returns relevant results, not a bunch of ads. If you have used free search your whole life, it kind of sucks to pay for it, but I would rather pay for searching than be a product people pay for every time I search. It doesn’t take much thought to see why being the product will always lead to a worse search platform.
Honestly, it shouldn’t cost that much for free search engines to build in — shouldn’t add a lot of compute load or anything. I expect that what Kagi did was to run a spider to build a list of hostnames and then to basically do a site search on a huge number of sites. If there’s demand, other search engines could provide similar functionality.
Who would win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or god?
Ha! Trick question.
Yeah. Lemmy would say “fuck that, you want rum and coke instead, mate?”
One option is by fitering and combining multiple site, as I show in that post here:)
Neat and simple. Thanks.
Double check me on this, but I think they have a “-site:” parameter that you can use in your searches.
Can we en-mass (all 20 of us) suggest a !bang to DDG?
I’m down. Interested in how it will work though. Do we want it to be lemmy.world, lemm.ee, everything? Do you constantly add more instances?
Lemmy is god
@JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee isn’t part of the point of ActivityPub to avoid vendor lockin/single point of billionaire enshittification? I read and interact with a fair amount of Lemmy content through an Mbin instance.
You can already limit Google using site:[DOMAIN].
If every ActivityPub driven service used a common TLD like .edus, you’d be able to limit results to that facet of Google’s index, they don’t. If they did, we’d be back to a single point of failure.
Google supports limiting searches to content using a Creative Commons license based on the licensing metadata in the URL. ActivityPub content already has the metadata, but it took a decade to generate enough content before Google offered the option to filter searches by CC-BY-SA… and Google was a VERY different company back then.
Ecosia is better for this than google
This would be a great Kagi lens (https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html ), perhaps for the Fediverse generally, rather than just for Lemmy. They already have one for Reddit, as well as a ‘small web’ one focused on small sites and non-commercial material.
As someone else pointed out above, they have had a search lens to do this for some time. It’s called “Fediverse Forums”.
I hadn’t noticed that until now. Thanks!
No problem. I ignore most of the extra features they provide — my interest in them is really for the privacy aspect — and the ability to search the Threadiverse is one of the very few extra features that I actually make meaningful use of.
Every aspect of this picture is cool
I just did some experimenting, and in duckduckgo.com at least, searches like this work quite well:
“Best CPU (site:lemm.ee OR site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ca)”
Not exactly user friendly, but it’s a starting point. At least two ways forward:
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A browser plugin with a config page allowing you to select/deselect your favourite instances, and make a bang operator to suit: e.g. “!lemmy”
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Petition search engines to do this themselves.
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perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues
