cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/963301

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.

  • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nzEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    Should be able to search all instances. If you know what instance your community is on, then you’ve already found it so… why search?

    • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      thats what this tool does, it lets you search all instances, but the great thing is it lets you choose what instance you are in so that the links open in your instance, instead of having to copy and paste into the search bar like with other search tools ive seen

    • Deftdrummer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      Until some app or instance or web link or whatever the fuck gets this right - critical mass does not occur.

    • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      yes that is what this is for, you select what instance you are from so that when you open the communities you searched for they open in your instance so that you can follow them

  • ComputerSagtNein@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    The instance browser should show the instance URL as well to be able to distinguish all those instances called “Lemmy”

    And it would be helpful if we could search for an instance to set as well. It’s a long list to scroll through.

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I agree with this suggestion. Without the URL, I’m kind of lost as to which instance I’m actually searching.

      Maybe a “search all” feature to seach all instances simultaneously? Although, I’m pretty sure that’s near impossible with how the fediverse works. Still would be cool.

      • Deftdrummer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        This. Lemmy seriously needs a way to search all instances or drastically cut down on the instance confusion somehow.

  • Galexio@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    The option to search for all instances would be beneficial. As another user posted, if you have an inkling that a community you’re looking for is in abc instance, then in a way the search app is redundant.

    Similarly, some specific communities have chosen to reside in niche instances. Allowing the user to search through all instances would make it “easier” to find the needle in the haystack.

    • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I believe if you host an instance it wont be federated until you start to follow other communities from other instances, then from my understanding all the communities in that instance will start to show up in your ‘all’ section. so the more you follow the more you will start to federate. thats what makes this tool so great is that you can search all communities and follow them since if you searched from your instance it wont find everything