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

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    The only reason it works for Reddit is because they have a singular domain name you can site search and the context engine is good enough to know you’re requesting a site search of www.reddit.com. Adding “Lemmy” to your query doesn’t help, but adding the URL to an instance does. Such as “thing I want to search Lemmy.World” actually results in hits on Lemmy.World and other instances directly linked to from it. You can do it with any instance you want. You could even add “site:URL” to make sure it’s doing the right kind of search if it doesn’t understand the context.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.eeOP
      3·
      10 hours ago

      Maybe by sheer volume, but it also kinda defeats the aim of the Lemmysphere and FV as I understand it.

      And you know, there are some other major instances besides LW. If you look at the classic ‘globe-chart’ I think that’s proven out.

      But, I think you’re also kinda acknowledging that, so not trying to pick a fight with you or anything. :S

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        Oh yea, totally agree. It’s a terrible solution, but it is a solution. I would much prefer something like SearXNG being able to array filter all Fediverse domains.

        • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.eeOP
          2·
          7 hours ago

          Ooh, that’s right!
          SearXNG, yes!

          Now, I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and it seemed to work NICELY when I last tried it.

          Ugh, TBH, I’m *not* very smart upon this stuff. Hopefully we as a group can improve the situation, tho…?

  • Jarix@lemmy.world
    181·
    1 day ago

    For anyone who doesnt know Lemmy, just want to say hes easy to get a bad first impression of.

    He was really well respected by people in music and was a good soul.

    Theres an good documentary on him i think was on netflix.

    Also My favourite clip of him

    Also fun fact, he was a roadie for Jimmy Hendrix

    • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.eeOP
      2·
      10 hours ago

      He was really well respected by people in music and was a good soul.

      Yeah, I got that sense, and that there was a collective sadness when he passed.

      • Jarix@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 hours ago

        There is a video game called brutal legend he does character for if interested.

        Yes I’m a bit of a fan.

        Inferno is probably my favourite Motorhead album, if you wanted to check em out

    • brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      19 hours ago

      I met him once or twice whenever my friends and I would end up at The Rainbow on sunset. It was always an interesting place to visit. Before he passed, you always knew Lemmy would be there. But you never knew who else you’d run into.

  • craig9@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    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:

    1. 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”

    2. Petition search engines to do this themselves.

  • mac@lemm.ee
    411·
    2 days ago

    Kagi (a paid search engine) has a “fediverse forums” filter option.

    • mycelium underground@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        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.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      10 hours ago

      I know I know, but I was half-toasted and body shutting down due to the usual CFS/ME at the time. I had to take a stab in some direction, haha.

      Give me a better analogy…?

      • venusaur@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Yikes! What happens if you chug coffee? Do you feel anything? Maybe tired and wired? What about amphetamines?

        They’re probably more similar to early Ozzy musically, but Lemmy is a sound of his own.

  • WanderingShadow@lemmy.world
    51·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • tauren@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Shouldn’t it be more or less the same with lemmy? We have a few major instances that are in sync with other instances, so indexing either of them should cover different sites.

    • JWBananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
      25·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        15·
        2 days ago

        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.

  • kreynen@kbin.melroy.org
    7·
    2 days ago

    @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.