maegulJul 5, 2023

#Lemmy gets a (new) search engine

It already had search (with some rough edges), but people are already making their own to fill specific needs ... chiefly it seems to replace the Google `site: reddit.com` search facility.

See ...

https://lemmy.world/post/963301

https://www.search-lemmy.com/

Interesting to see a platform culture completely embrace being open and public.

@fediversenews

Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy - Lemmy.world

I shared bits and pieces of this before, but it’s officially up and running now: https://www.search-lemmy.com/ [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 [http://lemmy.ml]. * Community – You can refine the search by a specific community. You use the same syntax that you’d use here community:[email protected]. * Author – Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as: author:@[email protected]. * 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 [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.

Show threadFellJul 5, 2023
@maegul @fediversenews Honestly, I wish the rest of the #Fediverse was like that. What's the point of a PUBLIC network when it's not searchable?
Show threadJupiter Rowland
@Fell @maegul #Friendica has has full-text search six years before Mastodon even existed. #Hubzilla, technically a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator, had full-text search four years before Mastodon existed.

Of course, both can only search what they know. They can't search for everything across the entire Fediverse. That's technologically nigh-impossible.
Netzgemeinde/Hubzilla

Jul 7, 2023 at 5:16amWeb
Show threadmaegulJul 7, 2023

@jupiter_rowland

Yes, sorry to pile on you @fell , but your comment highlights very well the problematic dominance mastodon has over the fediverse. Search, for better/worse, is something where it's mastodon that's the odd one out ... and yet, to the vast majority it seems like the norm for the whole fediverse.

It's significant because it means one small software team is basically dictating what the whole fediverse looks like.

Show threadMike MacgirvinJul 7, 2023
"That's technologically nigh-impossible."

No, it actually isn't. And I've been building it. But I'm retired from open source now and only have an hour or two every day that I can work on stuff like this. Distributed search will be slower than centralised search. That comes with the territory. But there are a number of ways of removing the cognitive barrier. One of these is to launch 'agents' that go out and find stuff for you - and then stick the results in a special stream you can visit and see more results the longer the agent is out there looking on your behalf.

It's not the "instant" search you see in something like Google, but Google is just agents which are already running on somebody else's computer searching and cataloguing distributed stuff.