The search features on default lemmy web and app clients are utter dogshit. I sometimes want to see if my question has already been answered elsewhere on lemmy, and I can’t find it (even when i remember seeing multiple versions of the same post before), so I often have to add yet another duplicate post about a common question (this post is likely an example of this too).
I am aware of people saying they see great results with the paid search engine “kagi”. Do you use any other better ways to query the fediverse?
I am aware of people saying they see great results with the paid search engine “kagi”. Do you use any other better ways to query the fediverse?
Kagi has a search lens for “Fediverse Forums”, which AFAICT builds a list of Threadiverse instances and searches them.
There isn’t a great way to replicate that on other search engines, but most of the communities exist on a relatively-small number of instances, and if you’re willing to settle for an incomplete search, you might do all right with a
site:search that includes the major Threadiverse instances.Note that a number of Threadiverse hosts have shifted to disallowing anonymous access, due to heavy load from webspiders being run by people scraping content for AI, making them unusable which probably means that search engines aren’t indexing them either. It looks like piefed.social is back to providing anonymous access, which I believe it had off for a while, but fedia.io, the main Mbin instance, still has anonymous access off.
https://lemmyverse.net/instances has a list of instances “smart-sorted”, which puts the major ones up top.
The top ones are lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml, lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.zip, lemmy.ca, programming.dev, feddit.org, sopuli.xyz, and beehaw.org.
Google supports Boolean search operators, so to search for tigers, search for:
site:lemmy.world OR site:sh.itjust.works OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:lemmy.dbzer0.com OR site:lemmy.zip OR site:lemmy.ca OR site:programming.dev OR site:feddit.org OR site:sopuli.xyz OR site:beehaw.org tiger
EDIT: Also note that while I don’t use the Lemmy Web UI’s search engine, instances won’t see posts unless at least one user is subscribed to the community in question, so if you want to use that search engine, you might have more luck searching on lemmy.world, which is the largest Threadiverse host and most likely to have seen a given post than mander.xyz’s, your home instance’s.
If you’re using the Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin in Firefox, it adds a link to the right sidebar on remote instances to view the current given post on your home instance, which might be useful if you’re doing that.
Sometimes people also just delete their post. There was this awesome picture of trump and Kim Jong un in Bikini yesterday, but now it was deleted :(
Yeah it sucks, and you cannot get good search results anywhere.
Not that you have many different options anyways…Lemmy search is only searching for exact text you searched for. There is somewhat useful option to search only post titles.
Piefed search at least has some filters (nsfw, post type, instance software, minimum score…) and search operators (and, or, not…) but it doesn’t have the search only post titles option.
Sometimes searching in google and just appending “lemmy” to your query will give surprisingly good result and sometimes it will return nothing.
Searxng has the search !bang for lemmy posts
!lepo, which gives more or less the same results as lemmys search.
