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
    391·
    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
      4·
      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
        3·
        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.

    • QuinicV@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Interesting. I hadn’t even thought about how the fact that instance1.[post] and instance2.[post@instance1] is essentially the same thing and how search engines would handle it. Interested in what you come up with!

      • marsara9@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        Thanks. If you do some digging you can find the project on GitHub but note that it’s a work in progress still. The UI is lacking and it’s rough around the edges but it’s “working”. And I still need to do some optimizations on the crawler itself, etc…

        It’s also going to be completely self-hostable just like Lemmy, etc…

    • PierreKanazawa@fedia.io
      1·
      1 year ago

      Tried it, pretty cool, though seems still depend on search engines’ indexing. The instance that I’m on seems not indexed.

      Also it’s interesting it uses intext to identify whether the results are from fediverse.

  • OsakaWilson@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    Digg.com was the big thing with Reddit trailing. Digg began tweaking the experience toward a more profitable model. I had already come to Reddit when they went too far and there was a sudden enormous migration from Digg to Reddit. Digg went from being THE social media aggregator to being nothing in a matter of weeks.

    Reddit is more deeply rooted, so I think it will stick around, I’m cool if Reddit keeps those who are happy with corporate model busy so we can do our thing here.

  • WhipTheLlama@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    If Lemmy becomes a source of enough information like Reddit is, search engines will index it. SEO is a marketing thing, and a place like Lemmy doesn’t really need that. Google, DDG, etc. all put engineering effort into making sure sites with lots of information are indexed and available in their search results.

    • QuinicV@lemmy.worldOP
      01·
      1 year ago

      I imagine that would be quite inconvenient… Especially as Lemmy grows and has potentially many more instances.

  • Ben@lemmy.world
    1·
    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.

  • ghariksforge@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Depends on Google. These tech companies don’t like new platforms, especially those competing with established ones like Reddit. You’ll see that Google often discriminates against Lemmy or Mastodon.

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
    32·
    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.

  • snailwizard@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Correct me if I’m wrong but if individual admins allow their instances to be indexed wouldn’t the instance itself have some sort of metadata identifying it as a Lemmy branch?

  • static@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Reddit did not start out as the thing to google, it’s 15+ years old, only in the last 5y I started prefixing my google searches with reddit.

    • BrerChicken @lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      I actually found Reddit by googling things. I had seen it 5 or 6 times over a few years, and eventually I just went to the main site. I might have even used Reddit in the search before I joined. Regardless, I had recognized that all the best answers for tricky problems that I had were coming from Reddit before I even joined 11 years ago.

    • Ben@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      I searched “3 days no poop meme” and I saw 2 from Reddit on the first page (via qwant),

      No Lemmy.

        • Ben@lemmy.world
          01·
          1 year ago

          How many of the millions of people doing searches will add Lemmy specifically? This only works if you wish to specifically search Lemmy, for which I’d suggest adding (intext:"modlog" & "instances" & "docs" & "code" & "join lemmy" | intext:"powered by kbin") to a Whoogle search would do better.

  • thingsiplay@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    @QuinicV Why would it not be possible? It depends on the software, if all text is open to be indexed. Kbin and Lemmy instances are basically open forum software and are indexed by search engines. You can test it in Google or other engines by forcing to search on the site only with site:lemmy.world are posts indexed? , which would be an empty search result if they were locked down like discord content.

    • QuinicV@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      But what if the post I’m searching for is not on lemmy.world? Say the instance doesn’t even have Lemmy in their name, like beehaw.org. How would a search engine index it? How would it know it’s part of Lemmy?

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        There will be links to everything somewhere. The same way you knew to get the cave in the same way you know to get to Lemmy. There are already links that have been posted to Reddit that are in archives that are easily followable. Google doesn’t just search one or two things they search all the links to the things and then the links from those things to other things. If Google can’t figure out how to get to it chances are you don’t know it’s there either.