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.worldEnglish
    32·
    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
      6·
      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
        4·
        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.

        • Aki@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I wonder if it’s possible to have a sophisticated search engine similar to Google’s, with BERT and kNN or vice versa. It would be the closest thing to Google search but specifically for Lemmy posts.

    • silly goose meekah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      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.worldOPEnglish
      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.worldEnglish
        1·
        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…