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[META] [Crosspost] Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy(www.search-lemmy.com)

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Akhuyan@lemmy.worldM
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newcommunities@lemmy.world
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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.

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∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
20 points

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?

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variants@possumpat.io
12 points

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

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2dollarsim@lemmy.world
17 points

Can’t just search for communities across all instances?

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Deftdrummer@lemmy.world
8 points

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

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variants@possumpat.io
5 points

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

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ekZepp@lemmy.world
5 points

Exactly. Is a pain to select the community from the phone

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ComputerSagtNein@lemm.ee
14 points

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.

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𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
9 points

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.

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Deftdrummer@lemmy.world
3 points

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

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cwagner@discuss.tchncs.de
2 points
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ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
4 points

Is this dead? The connection just times out.

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Matengor@lemmy.ml
3 points

Seems like it. Timed out for me too 😢

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Granixo@feddit.cl
4 points

Seems to be really useful, thanks!

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New Communities

!newcommunities@lemmy.world

Create post

A place to post new communities all over Lemmy for discovery and promotion.

Rules

The rules may be more established as time goes on, but it’s important to have a foundation to work on.

1. Follow the rules of Lemmy.world - These rules are the same as Mastodon.world’s rules, which can be found here.

2. Include a community title and description in your post title. - A following example of this would be New Communities - A place to post new communities all over Lemmy for discovery and promotion.

3. Follow the formatting. - The formatting as included below is important for people getting universal links across Lemmy as easily as possible.

Formatting

Please include this following format in your post:

[link text](/c/community@instance.com)

This provides a link that should work across instances, but in some cases it won’t

You should also include either:

!community@instance.com

or instance.com/c/community

FAQ:

Q: Why do I get a 404?

A: At least one user in an instance needs to search for a community before it gets fetched. Searching for the community will bring it into the instance and it will fetch a few of the most recent posts without comments. If a user is subscribed to a community, then all of the future posts and interactions are now in-sync.

Q: When I try to create a post, the circle just spins forever. Why is that?

A: This is a current known issue with large communities. Sometimes it does get posted, but just continues spinning, but sometimes it doesn’t get posted and continues spinning. If it doesn’t actually get posted, the best thing to do is try later. However, only some people seem to be having this problem at the moment.

Image Attribution:

Fahmi, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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