2d ago

HOW can we coax search-engines in to being able to do the simple "lemmy" + "search word" thing..?

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

44 comments

site:lemmy.world It may not be great, but most content ends up there.
- site:lemmy.dbzer0.com for piracy, nsfw for nsfw

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
- "Screw 'em, do what you want" shall be the whole of the law.
- 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.

I just watched Last of Us (inspired by the game) featuring Pedro Pascal. Looks very similar to Lemmy.
- no

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:
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"
Petition search engines to do this themselves.

Kagi (a paid search engine) has a "fediverse forums" filter option.
- 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.
  
  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.

Lemmy is god

Every aspect of this picture is cool

Can we en-mass (all 20 of us) suggest a !bang to DDG?
- Whats the email i need to send the request to.
- I'm down. Interested in how it will work though. Do we want it to be lemmy.world, lemm.ee, everything? Do you constantly add more instances?

Motörhead ≠ Led Zeppelin
- Yeah... I love both but Led Zep is way more of a hippie rock vibe and motorhead is like biker rock
  
  Yeah I’ll smoke a joint to Zep but I’ll chug a Guinness to Motörhead
  
  You mean that zeppelin was high in the clouds and motorhead are oil heads?

@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.

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.
- 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.
- As someone on mbin rather than lemmy, lemmy isn't even all of us.
- 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.
- And that's why it's so cool that Kagi has an option to limit your search to the fediverse.
- 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.
  A search engine could easily enough set up their own Lemmy server to search from. Same with Mastodon.
  _This _comment _is _licensed _under _CC _BY-NC-SA _4.0
  
  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.

"-music" should mostly do the trick... unless you're looking for music.

Who would win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or god?
- Ha! Trick question.
  
  Yeah. Lemmy would say "fuck that, you want rum and coke instead, mate?"

One option is by fitering and combining multiple site, as I show in that post here:)
https://mander.xyz/post/7198692
- Neat and simple. Thanks.

Double check me on this, but I think they have a "-site:" parameter that you can use in your searches.
_This _comment _is _licensed _under _CC _BY-NC-SA _4.0
- the minus would remove sites. Useful it you want to do X -site:reddit.com but that leaves all that isn't reddit.

This would be a great Kagi lens (https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html ), perhaps for the Fediverse generally, rather than just for Lemmy. They already have one for Reddit, as well as a 'small web' one focused on small sites and non-commercial material.
- As someone else pointed out above, they have had a search lens to do this for some time. It's called "Fediverse Forums".
  
  I hadn't noticed that until now. Thanks!

Ecosia is better for this than google

perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tw5_9Zxy2U

44 comments