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.

  • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    This is great! I was so annoyed by the links not going to my home instance that I made this userscript (Lemmy post)! It rewrites all links on all websites to always point to your home instance.

    Could be a nice addition for everyone that likes this website :)

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Are the search result links not opening on your home instance? If so please raise an issue on GitHub with your home instance URL and I’ll investigate. But you should be able to select your home instance from the drop-down and then search and all of the results will have their links direct to that instance. (This does require that your instance has been indexed by the search engine, which as of this moment I’ve only indexed 278 of the nearly 1000? Lemmy instances out there.)

      • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        I think you misunderstood. You were annoyed by links not going to your home instance when searching so you made this website. I was annoyed by all links everywhere not going to my home instance so I wrote the script. They’re both tools that help achieve the same thing so I felt right to post mine here, too :)

  • theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    Holy fuck I’ve been thinking about how annoying it is that I can’t search lemmy for a few days now - and here you are suddenly just handing the tool I want to me with features that I didn’t even think about. THANK YOU SO MUCH. Adding this post to my saved.

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Due to a one of my primary goals of having links open in your home instance, you can only search a single instance at a time.

      There’s an open issue about this though but it requires some changes to Lemmy itself to work.

      • whzfux@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Not wanting to undermine your excellent work, what would be the specific advantage yet, compared to searching for communities / posts via the lemmy page?

        I am completly New to lemmy or reddit and still searching for a nice and easy way to find relevant threads for me

        • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          The built in search, well sucks. Search for “Not undermine wanting” and you won’t be able to find your comment. Essentially:

          1. All words are required
          2. The order of each of the search terms is important
          3. The search results here provide no ranking.
          4. The searching here is relatively slow. (now some queries on my site are slow as well, but most should be fast)
          • whzfux@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Ahhh i think i got it - so it is not a search for communities but for full text

            It then makes sense to me why i need toselecft an instance beforehand.

  • hutchpd@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    Can it filter NSFW posts? As on Reddit you can search “pussy nsfw:no” and get pictures of cats.

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Yes but that search doesn’t take you to the instance that you are logged into already. Which is one of my main goals with this site. While that did give me the inspiration for this and has the power of Google behind it, it lacks knowledge about how the fediverse actually works.

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      “some search string instance:lemmy.world”.

      Keywords are:

      instance:<instance name>

      community:!<community name>@<instance name>

      and

      author:@<author name>@<instance name>.

  • DankMemeMachine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for this! I was trying to figure out how to best replace the old “site:reddit.com” trick, and it did not quite work with lemmy with how it is federated. I hope that longer term we can get an “all” tab on lemmy that truly tries to pull from as many of the federated sites as possible to get us closer to the Reddit experience. I tried to do some research on extreme heat clothing due to the wet bulb temps in my area but r/mensfashion and most other clothing reddits still seemed private, maybe I can try searching with your solution now.

    • Konala Koala@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Well, we were probably already due or going on past due for something to best replace the old “site:reddit.com” with “site:lemmy.world” for instance.

  • MrValdez@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    With the new third party apps coming up, maybe they can use your search engine. TAP connectivity!

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      1 year ago

      I can’t give a timeframe on Kbin yet, as I want to get it as stable as possible with Lemmy. fist. But I think Kbin will probably be next on my radar as the overall structure of the two platforms is very similar.

  • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Can’t wait for all the various lemmy tools to be integrated into lemmy UI

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      It might not have been crawled yet. The search engine will periodically search for new content but this isn’t instant. So it may take a day or two to find it.

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        still not working - is this possibly because of the server being overloaded & the crawl not working? relevant query

        PS: is it too much load on your search engine to search across all instances by default? Atm it auto-selects the first in the dropdown list as the preferred instance.

        • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Search engines take time to crawl websites to find content. Right now I’m using lemmy.ml as my source of truth. So:

          1. The post in question must have been federated to Lemmy.ml
          2. The crawler then has to discover that post. Right now it’s only scheduled to run on demand, as it’s still doing it’s initial crawl. So it won’t get around to checking Lemmy.ml for new posts for a few days. Eventually it runs once every 6 hours, once it’s caught up.
          3. Lastly, it has to cross-reference that post on your preferred instance. This is what the crawler is doing right now. It’s taking every post it found on lemmy.ml and trying to find the same post on every other instance.

          P.s. the last step is only required because there’s no way to hotlink to a post today as the URL uses an internal identifier. There’s an open GitHub issue on this for Lemmy itself. When/if that is resolved I might be able to speedup the discovery of new content by skipping the cross-referencing step altogether.

          • tarjeezy@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Hello, I commented about a bug in the instance selector on a cross post, not realizing that wasn’t the actual developer. Not sure if it’s related to what you’re talking about here, but I wanted to bring it to your attention. Great project by the way!

            https://lemmy.ca/comment/829227

            • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Replied to your comment there. I’ll definitely look into that bug tonight. But I’m still exploring ideas to make instance selection easier …

  • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Update: I’m hoping I got the stability issues fixed. I’ll know more in the next 24hrs though.