Fediverse @lemmy.world marsara9 @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy

I shared bits and pieces of this before, but it's officially up and running now: https://www.search-lemmy.com/

This is an enhanced search engine for Lemmy. With a few primary goals:

You can choose a preferred instance. After choosing what your primary instance is, and performing a search ALL links will open in that instance.
This aims to be a replacement for using site:reddit.com in Google, but just for the fediverse.
You can filter the search results by:
- Instance -- This will filter the results to only show communities that belong to a particular instance. Just type something like instance:lemmy.wrold or instance:https://lemmy.world/. This is separate from your preferred instance, such that you can search for posts on lemmy.world while still opening them on lemmy.ml.
- Community -- You can refine the search by a specific community. You use the same syntax that you'd use here community:!fediverse@lemmy.world.
- Author -- Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as: author:@marsara9@lemmy.world.
The entire thing is open-source. You can view the code and even host your own instance... See more details here: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search.

NOTE: This only supports Lemmy instances for now. Other fediverse type instances may be in the future depending on how this works out.

I've been working on this over just the last few weeks, so it hasn't had a chance to crawl much of the fediverse yet. For now it only supports lemmy.world and lemmy.ml but other preferred-instances will come online as time goes by.

If anyone finds any bugs, and I'm sure you will, or if anyone has any suggestions PLEASE raise an issue on GitHub for me to track. Lastly, if anyone wants to help contribute please feel free to reach out.

NOTE TO SERVER ADMINS: You can prevent your site from being crawled by adding lemmy-search to your robots.txt for the user-agent.

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Wondering if this will see the same backlash that Mastodon had when users were planning to add a search engine - many users moved to Mastodon specifically because their posts are unsearchable by default, and that prevents some dogpiling that was common on Twitter.
- Great heads up
  
  I just don’t get why people would join SOCIAL media if they don’t want to their posts public. Its like having a group meeting in the middle of a public square and complain people saw them
  
  Maybe they should just use discord or or private communities instead
- Lemmy is not private in any way. In fact, while the OP's project is really cool and admirable, there is already https://fedi-search.com, which searches top Lemmy instances (and kbin, Mastodon, and peertube) using regular operators behind the scenes in Google, Bing or DDG (whichever you prefer), because those search engines already crawl Lemmy along with the rest of the internet, unless the site owners block crawling via robots.txt.
  
  Now we need a ddg !bang for it!
- I've already got some complaints about that. You can see one of the issues raised on GitHub.
  
  At the moment, I'm only picking up mastodon posts that are federated to Lemmy, but you can't choose Mastodon as a preferred-instance, yet. When and/if I decide to add Mastodon support, I'll reach out to the admins over there to get feedback first.
  
  Edit and note to any server admin: If you want to block the crawler from hitting your site, just add lemmy-search to your robots.txt and crawling will be prevented. But this doesn't stop cross-federation posts from being picked up on another instance.
  
  Thats very considerate of you
  
  Please don’t take those complaints as negative feedback. I don’t think Lemmy is designed to be private and your search engine would be a great of help to the whole community.
  
  By the way, do you plan to create a community to discuss about your search engine? Maybe users can help you with testing or report issues or improvement
  
  I've got a discord page up and going that is invite only right now. No offense to anyone here but i didn't want to be overwhelmed with users joining in on the discord chat just yet. If you want to help contribute or even just test you can easily find me on discord, and I'll give you an invite.
  
  Starting a Search-Lemmy community here might be good for visibility too.
  
  If anyone wants to start one up... by all means. I'm not really one to moderate an entire community. At least not yet.
  
  Yeah I hear you. I've thought several times about starting niche communities that aren't here yet but I just am not capable or even able to be a moderator.
  
  By the time they gain traction you can hand them off.
  
  I think it makes sense for a “redditlike” to be searchable, while also understanding that Mastodon is a different beast and can benefit from lack of search.
  
  Don’t know if Mastodon posts on Lemmy instances have a specific characteristic, but perhaps you can consider filtering them out while keeping “regular” Lemmy posts and comments?
  
  I think the use case and the default expectations about search are pretty different on Lemmy, but I can definitely see this being a potential point of friction, particularly since most content is actually structured by community rather than instance, and in many cases it would make more sense to exclude stuff based on the community it's posted to or the individual user than by instance. (But I'm sure that wouldn't be immediately technically feasible.)
  
  Ya Lemmy organizes everything under a community technically. I mean I can filter on any piece of data I can get my hands on, but what makes the most sense. For MVP I chose to just grab whatever the API would give me. But then the question comes, if I do start filtering results, how do I determine what to actually exclude... long story short -- not an easy problem at least initially.
  
  Is it “lemmy-search” or “lemmy-server”? The post and this comment seem conflicting (if I didn’t miss something)
  
  Thanks for that, fixing. But it should be lemmy-search.
- TBH they can block them from search in the preferences. Otherwise anything on the Web is searchable and findable.
- Great heads up
  
  I just don’t get why people would join SOCIAL media if they don’t want to their posts public. Its like having a group meeting in the middle of a public square and complain people saw them
  
  Maybe they should just use discord or or private communities instead

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