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
    2·
    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
      0·
      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
        1·
        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.

  • Ben@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Ok, not a stupid question - but annoying to assume that only Google is relevant.

    Also, annoying that you’ll assume that searching ‘instant rice’ will pull results from Lemmy. Even searching Lemmy for ‘instant rice’ brings zero results.

    • Instant rice simply had all of the good parts milled out If you really are interested, I’d skip it entirely - ‘instant’ rice is basically rice that got everything milled out of it, then it’s cooked, then dried - it costs a lot more and tastes like shit.

    So I hope my answer will come up in your next search…

    However, searching for ‘sending epub files to my kindle’ brings up quite a few… and down the list there, we see posts from 2022 in r/kindle, and entering reddit as an extra keyword pulls up more…

    So really, we want to know if we search for something which should have results in Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world - and not only Lemmy, there are others - like BeeHaw) how long is it going to take before this gets picked up by SEARCH ENGINES (Let’s not say Google, or Reddit - these are bad habits unless there’s a specific need to specify).> instant rice

    • hardypart@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      but annoying to assume that only Google is relevant.

      Google’s market share is around 92%. Of course it’s the most relevant thing. Other search engines only exist for 10% of the users.

      • Ben@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        You know that Google and Reddit own the internet - so just go there, and make sure you’re using a Chromium based browser because that’s the market share too.

        That way, you can work to create a Fediverse whilst Google and friends succeed in closing all the loops to take total control of your internet and browser.

        Other people will say they ‘search’.

        Part of the marketing strategy is to make Microsoft, Google, Reddit etc the default.

        Why reinforce it?

        The issue is becoming accessible to Search.

        Not specifically to become accessible to Google.

        Here’s one example of something I found OUTSIDE the fediverse via search.

        I use SearXNG, but I remember that one came via Qwant search and NOT via Google.

        Language IS very important here, and it’s important to avoid always using ‘default’ branded options which are not and should never be considered the default.

  • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world
    0·
    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?

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
    01·
    1 year ago

    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.