I did a couple of searches with duckduckgo and google, finding that unlike reddit it doesnt really suggest posts on lemmy, just whole communities. Im curious if this is unavoidable with this number of users or if there is a way to make search engines suggest better lemmy results and make the resources accumulating here useful for a broader audience.
I have been thinking about this. For other sites it is super easy to google e.g. “bifl socks reddit” but with federated services the information is scattered across many domains/services that the search engines do not know are federated. There either needs to be a site that archives everything in real time that search engines can crawl, or a robust search engine specifically designed for searching posts on all known instances.
Full disclosure I am not an expert on the topic these are just my thoughts.
it is super easy to google e.g. “bifl socks reddit” but with federated services
I also guess that’s the issue. Many lemmy instances do not have ‘lemmy’ in their URL. So if someone searches for “bifl socks lemmy”, they might not see results from these lemmy instances with non-lemmy names.
You’re kinda right? It’ll be harder for links to be considered authoritative by google since they’ll be across a bunch of smaller websites with fewer references to them (unlike reddit, which is 1 website with billions of links to it).
But maybe it’ll work somewhat anyway since every page has “Join Lemmy” text in the bottom & google might be able to link them together.
On the other hand I have no idea and I’m just going off my vague understanding of how the google algorith m works.
I suspect that Google could do it, but won’t. When they ditched “Don’t be evil” as their corporate motto, they went all the way. Alphabet is as evil as they come. The Fediverse isn’t a giant corporation, and Reddit is. So Google won’t be doing us any favors. It’s that simple.
