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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.
Can’t emphasize enough how important this is for the growth of Lemmy. Many people I know only access Reddit through google searches.
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.
Please pop a reminder here. Commenting for a bump.
Search their name on GitHub and you'll find it. Star it to follow.
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!
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...
If this guy changes the internet include me in the screenshot.
I’ll invest in seed funding stage. 😂
The mastodon crowd was verry anti on search engines, and killed projects like this.
But yea, do it! I think the lemmy/kbin crowd would mostly like it
That sounds awesome. Can't wait to see it.
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.
On reddit you may have the same post twice but the comments will be different. On Lemmy, you have the same post on every federated lemmy with the same comments on all of them. With the way google handles websites right now, if they started including Lemmy instances in their web, it end up having hundreds of the exact same result each hosted on a different lemmy instance.
Edit for clarity: All lemmy sites share their data with each other unless they explicitly stop doing so (defederating). This is why I can respond to your comment even though I'm on kbin.social and you're on lemmy.world
I am surprised noone mentioned https://fedi-search.com . It's working pretty well. Full credit to Benjamin Pryor for this
You can use a search query to include only results with Lemmy's footer, which is consistent across all Lemmy instances. I made a post about it here: https://lemmy.world/post/342365
You formatted your link wrong. here is the correctly formatted link
The label field is for what we will see. And the URL field is the actual link.
The markdown syntax is [link label](actual link)
Also: You can always paste links without formatting https://lemmy.world/post/342365
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.
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.
Most likely if it's being sold for anything it's for language model testing.
If Lemmy becomes a source of enough information like Reddit is, search engines will index it. SEO is a marketing thing, and a place like Lemmy doesn't really need that. Google, DDG, etc. all put engineering effort into making sure sites with lots of information are indexed and available in their search results.
I think it is preferable to ask other search engines like DuckDuckGo to index Lemmy info. Google is full of garbage.
In the future they eventually might be, for some instances. Though definitely not for all of them, since some of the instances might disable indexing.
I've actually already seen a few Lemmy results (lemmy.ml) in Google searches, the trouble is it doesn't link to individual posts, just the community so it's not particularly useful. So it definitely is possible, just needs to be improved to be able to index posts.
It’s up to the individual instance owner and Lemmy the software itself enabling SEO. It’s just getting started now so it will be long time before that.
likely not THAT long. I'm sure things are already being crawled
Maybe, but probable Google try to kill us
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.
Cool rage but you dismissing search indexing is kinda hilarious. It's not going away and it's what makes the web.
I came here to say something similar but you put it nicely.
Basically use <query> site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:beehaw.org OR site:kbin.social (or whatever main instances you want to hit)
You can also use this for custom browser search keys like the following https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+site%3Alemmy.world+OR+site%3Alemmyml+OR+site%3Abeehaw.org+OR+site%3Akbin.social
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.
Everyone's experience on this will be different, but I personally started using reddit about 12 years or so ago largely because at that point a lot of my Google searches were already pointing me towards reddit. I wasn't necessarily going to google specifically to find reddit results, but since that's where I kept ending up i figured I might as well go straight to reddit. And since reddit's search function is and has always been trash, i pretty much immediately started using Google to search reddit.
I actually found Reddit by googling things. I had seen it 5 or 6 times over a few years, and eventually I just went to the main site. I might have even used Reddit in the search before I joined. Regardless, I had recognized that all the best answers for tricky problems that I had were coming from Reddit before I even joined 11 years ago.
I would argue that eventually, yes, one will be able to google search Lemmy just like Reddit.
Only if we make sure the tech giants don't kill this platform
How would they? It's all decentralized
They could join the fediverse, attract a majority of users to their platform by adding attractive features, and then remove themselves from the fediverse effectively killing it
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Google could prevent lemmy pages from showing up in the results for example.
Or they could adapt the protocol, make their own slightly tweaked version of it and let it die, which apparently often also kills the original protocol due to newly introduced compatibility issues, etc.
Not sure about the second part, I read about it here somewhere where they mentioned an example of that happening as well but I can't find it anymore.
I wish there was a way to get an entire Reddit archive over here. Realistically I'm still going to have to search Reddit because it has 10+ years of answers to obscure questions.
Minds more intelligent than mine are probably already at work on these problems. I've seen multiple discussion of people saying they are designing and working on solutions. It may take some time to see results, though.
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.