Why YSK: Searching topcs on reddit was simple matter of entering desired term and prepending or appending keyword reddit. With lemmy’s decentralised structure finding particular topic without knowing to which, or rather if even there is community dealing with such topic(s) can be a headache inducing hurdle. So appending simple:
site: lemmy.*
site:lemmy.*
to Your google search feature can ease up search.
P.S.
to avoid certain domains You can use e.g.:
-site: beehaw
-site:beehaw
@edit: removed spaces thank You @inquisitor1965@kbin.social
There’s also https://fedi-search.com/ that searches a bunch of the larger instances if you don’t want to type a bunch of stuff in.
Somebody posted a tool that handles this sort of searching for a number of popular instances that do not fit the usual patterns, see https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/52753
You can also search for text that is present on most Lemmy pages and in URLs like:
“Join Lemmy” inurl:post
I feel like I didn’t think about this while creating my instance
Duckduckgo has a bang for Mastodon: !msocial. Maybe we should start putting in requests for Fediverse bangs: !lemmy, !kbin, !beehaw, etc.
It would be better if they would add !fediverse that searches all of the sites. Maybe one day!
If you use firefox, you can use extensions to add any lemmy instances as a search engine options. Then, simply add an @ shortcut to the lemmy search engine options, and you’ll have the ddg equivalent of bangs in your firefox search bar.
Firefox does allow you to change search engine straight from the search bar by typing @ shortcut. An example of this by default, typing @ddg on firefox makes you search with duckduckgo instead of your default search engine.
Keep in mind that you have to type the shortcut on the searchbar first, before typing anything else.
Very cool, I didn’t know they added !msocial.
Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.
I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.
On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots…?
I just requested a !kbin bang. In the request form they ask for a search URL such as https://kbin.social/search?q={{{s}}}. I tested it and it worked on kbin. I am thinking that the more people request these bangs the more likely they get approved.
I’ll try submitting the same, sure.
I am suspicious that the search URL will only be indexing kbin.social and not the greater kbin/lemmy universe which is not good. But it’s a !kbin bang and the !msocial bang goes to mastodon.social so I guess it makes sense.
I’d much rather see a !kbin search that returned results from all kbin instances it has indexed, and a !lemmy search that does the same for lemmy instances, or a !fediforum search that returned results from both. But it’s a start!
