There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

crawancon ,

whoever is left there deserves whatever happens. they really showed what they thought of the users over the years. culminating in app/api control.

…and Pepperidge Farm definitely remembers saydra.

cmnybo ,

It seems like it’s mostly just bots left there now.

dullbananas ,
@dullbananas@lemmy.ca avatar

Poople

bulwark ,

Not an ad, but Kagi is worth it. I’m ok with paying for search tho.

abcdqfr ,

Yes an ad, and a free one at that.

Karyoplasma ,

I’ll pass, but thanks for the reminder.

Nachorella ,

I’ve been using it for a while and agree. At least I know how they’re making money off of me.

twoface ,

Still seeing new Reddit posts on Kagi. Lets hope it stays this way.

grandma ,

Kagi pays Google for search results to supplement its index so it will keep reddit results as long as Google lets them

sag ,

I will pay for a server and then host SearX-NG rather than paying for a Good Service. Yep, I am wierd.

moon ,

Stop shilling for this scam of a service

The free alternatives are better

hperrin ,

That’s fine. I don’t want Reddit results anyway.

filcuk ,

Unfortunately (for me, I guess), appending ‘reddit’ is still the way to go for many queries…

ShepherdPie ,

I’ve notice a huge decline in the reliability of using this now that every company on earth knows about this trick. You’ll just be served up posts with 0-3 comments and few upvotes when searching for product reviews or recommendations for example.

JackbyDev ,

The way the article is written you’ll still get existing information, just not new posts.

JackbyDev ,

If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week.

That’s absolutely insane… Reddit truly is making things awful. The “just add reddit” or “just add site:reddit.com” has been trash for a while because they bombard you with the “pwease use the app” and not showing more than like three comments at a time. It’s useless.

Imgonnatrythis ,

Meh, fuck em. The tighter they make their circle the less useful it is.

Reminder that Kagi searches Lemmy which is great.

Boozilla ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy’s stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.

hotpot8toe OP ,

tbh I’ve never seen a Lemmy link when searching for stuff. Is it too small to show up? Or do search engines not index Lemmy instances?

Dasnap ,
@Dasnap@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve seen it a couple of times when searching on DDG.

BombOmOm ,
@BombOmOm@lemmy.world avatar

You can always add “site:lemmy.world” to your search (remove the quotes). I commonly do that, as well as the same for reddit or stack overflow.

_haha_oh_wow_ ,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

The problem with that is, lemmy.world is only one of many different instances. Too bad there isn’t a way to add a modifier that searches the entire fediverse.

olicvb ,
@olicvb@lemmy.ca avatar

yea i’ve been doing “inurl:lemmy” for that reason

Telorand ,

You’d miss instances that don’t use “lemmy” in the URL, but it’s at least a better solution than specifying a single instance.

noodlejetski , (edited )

from the top of my head, that won’t include lemm.ee, sopuli, beehaw, szmer.info, slrpnk.net, sh.itjust.works, or other threadiverse instances like kbin/mbin.

Frellwit ,

Appending (intext:“modlog” & “instances” & “docs” & “code” & “join lemmy”) to your search query will search most instances. Works with Google, Startpage, SearXNG afaik.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

A lot of Fediverse admins are just normal people like you and me with a budget, and disallowing bots and spiders helps save bandwidth, and the budget.

chrischryse ,

Really? I thought they were free and didn’t affect bandwidth.

thejml ,

Any data transit costs money. Both in the data transit itself and in the increased server resources to respond to the web queries in the first place.

darkkite ,

bots take resources to serve just like any regular user

Damage ,

They usually only index text though

cyborganism ,

Could it be possible to have one major global instance that aggregates everything so it can be indexed by search engines? Would that work? Or do I not fully understand how federation works?

wholookshere ,

That would defeat the purpose of federation.

It becomes a central choke point of moderation. Who gets to decide what instances are part of global and which ones aren’t. Because a free for all isn’t going to end well. And then you’re back at Reddit.

WanderingVentra ,

I wonder if you could have an instance federated to every other instance just for archived purposes, to save the data on every other instance’s post and comment. Because copies of posts and comments are saved to federated instances, too, right? Or do I understand the tech wrong?

So it could have an admin team but no users, to prevent people worried about spammers and bots joining that instance to get around defederation rules. Maybe it just has a bot that crawls Lemmy, looking for instances to federate to. Could that work?

4am ,

You’re describing Meta’s plan but yes that could work.

barsoap ,

Lemmy search already is quite excellent… at least here on lemm.ee, we don’t have many communities but tons of users subscribed to probably about everything on the lemmyverse so the servers have it all.

It might be interesting to team up with something like YaCy: Instances could operate as YaCy peers for everything they have. That is, integrate a p2p search protocol into ActivityPub itself so that also smaller instances can find everything. Ordinary YaCy instances, doing mostly web crawling, can in turn use posts here as interesting starting points.

amanda ,
@amanda@aggregatet.org avatar

I was worrying about precisely this. I’d be ok with blocking search engines if there was a better way of searching but AFAICT there isn’t federated search of any kind?

HobbitFoot ,

All a spider needs is an instance to download everything.

infeeeee ,

Most of the originalish content on lemmy are linux related stuff, memes and porn. The latter 2 are mostly image/video based, so you don’t search for that very frequently and easily. I can see that in the future it will become a very relevant source of info in linux admin and user circles.

I go back to r*ddit sometimes for some local content which is non existent on lemmy. I see that the tech related subs are mostly dead there, or at least only shadows of their former selfs. E.g. go to r/linux, sort by top all time. In the first 100 results you will barely find anything posted after the exodus.

MudMan ,

Yeah, the notion that Lemmy is a Reddit replacement is misguided. It definitely doesn't have the same Q&A balance Reddit does. It feels a lot more like 90s and early 2000s forums than the large-scale self-service link and customer service churn Reddit encourages.

Which I'm all for. I was never a Reddit guy and I do like it here. But in terms of how bad it is now that Reddit is not happy to host most of the actually useful online content for free... well, that's a different conversation.

Apytele ,

Yeah I mostly go back for r/BestofRedditorUpdates to get my trash drama fix and r/nursing to commiserate with my people. I’ve tried bringing in more hcw communities but sometimes its tiring to be the first of a few to move over. It elicits some pretty strong feelings of isolation.

NotAnotherLemmyUser ,

One of the major problems with Lemmy is that many posts get deleted and that nukes the comment section (which is where most of the answers will be).

I wish Lemmy deleted posts closer to how Reddit deletes posts - the post content should be deleted, but leave the comments alone.

Cheradenine ,

Searx will show Lemmy results, at least on some Searx instances.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/0e5359ad-a4d4-4540-9fc9-81fc1fef5258.jpeg

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.

user224 ,
@user224@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I’ve seen some when I appended “Lemmy” just like “Reddit”. But it relies on lemmy being in the domain name.

Also I assume even when people click on those results, they don’t get ranked much higher because it’s so many different domains while reddit is just one.

madcaesar ,

Adding lemmy does nothing for me, it searches for Lemingrad or some shit.

Ibuthyr ,

Kagi has a button that lets you search fediverse forums. I haven’t tested it yet though.

Edit: yup, works like a charm!

Gerudo ,

Twice I have come across links to lemmy, definitely not the norm though.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Highly doubtful.

The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:

  1. Ideological ranting. "The problem is you aren’t running arch linux in that corporate environment with proprietary hardware you need to interface with"
  2. Complete refusal to read the question. "I totally didn’t read that you said Foo was not viable for reasons XYZ but you should use Foo"
  3. Complete nonsense

Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.

I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast “site”. So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than “Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y”.

That said: I have said it before and I’ll say it again. The age of the online message board for tech support is long gone. Because the super useful results might be talking about a bug from five years ago rather than a bug from today. The answer really is ephemeral discord servers.

fuzzzerd ,

Ephemeral discord servers are awful because they don’t scale and they can only ever help the lowest common denominator of questions/issues. We need something else, but it has yet to present itself as a solution.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I’m sure you’ve had bad experiences but they actually scale as well as any forum ever did and are great because the general vibe is not “This was asked ten years ago, go figure out some search terms” and more actually responding to and helping people.

The key is to have a moderated support channel.

fuzzzerd ,

It’s a never ending onslaught of beginner questions and experienced folks with domain knowledge burn out. I’m sure it’s good when it’s new and fresh and everyone is exited to participate, but that wears out. It’s why things went away from mailing lists, or why mailing lists started getting archived, so they could be searched.

I guess with most things it comes in cycles, and we’re at the on demand answers cycle right now.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

That has not at all been my experience over the years.

Yes, the vast majority of questions are “beginner questions”. Which… is true no matter where you go.

But when someone has the ability to articulate a “real” problem? Everyone comes out of the woodwork because that is actually interesting. And there is a very strong communal feeling of “we all have the same problem and are trying to collect data”

butter ,

Drop a link to a few places people ask tech questions and I will do my part to contribute

xnx ,

Yeah but we need non technical stuff too which i what i hate about the ui and stuff mot trying to be made simpler for non tech people to start using lemmy. I want doctors, lawyers, and casual people asking questions about everyday items and stuff so i can search “best sleep mask lemmy” or any product category and find good discussions. Would also help if lemmy.com was an instance instead of just redirecting to lemm.ee

sag ,

Fuck You Reddit

reddig33 ,

I’m not understanding what stops a search engine from scraping a publicly accessible website. ?

Eril ,

robots.txt, I guess? Yes, you can just ignore it, but you shouldn’t, if you develop a responsible web scraper.

reddig33 ,

Doesn’t seem legal that a robots.txt could pick and choose who scrapes. Seems like legally it would have to be all or nothing. Here’s hoping one of the search engines ignores it and makes it a legal case.

Eril ,

Actually currently it contains this:


<span style="color:#323232;">User-agent: *
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Disallow: /
</span>

Well, that actually is a blanket ban for everyone, so something else must be at play here.

starman ,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

merj.com/…/investigating-reddits-robots-txt-cloak…

Reddit is serving different file to google

hotpot8toe OP ,

Also, rate limiting. A publicly accessible website doesn’t mean that it will allow scrapers to read millions of pages each week. They can easily identify and block scrapers because of the pattern of their activity. I don’t know if Reddit has rate-limiting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they implement one.

dabster291 ,
@dabster291@lemmy.zip avatar

paywalled link :(

hotpot8toe OP ,

I got you archive.ph/GS2I0

TypicalHog ,

thats fucked

Death_Equity ,

I’m not saying we should have gulags, but if we did, I have some suggestions for permanent residency.

MudMan ,

Okay, hear me out, we should make a different service, like a network of computers where people can freely post information on some sort of page that other people can freely access without needing to log in to a million services. Maybe we could also add like little conversation boards to those to allow people to ask and answer questions, too.

Wild, I know, but I think there is some opportunity there.

nyan ,

The important part is not building it, but convincing the world, alas.

Karyoplasma ,

Yeah, not gonna happen. Fact is, Johnny Everyday doesn’t give a shit he’s flooded with ads, tracked on every click and is now forced into exclusivity deals because “somebody has to pay for this stuff and it ain’t me”. Likewise, the people giving the answers don’t care that they literally work for free for some megacorporations. It’s a rotten system and society is to blame.

We are not making a difference here either, not fooling myself into thinking that. I mainly use Lemmy because I can access it with any app I want while sitting on the loo.

clgoh ,

That would be perfect to train LLMs.

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Darn it

BurnSquirrel ,

Still couldn’t get me to use it, I use DDG which can switch between search engines and search sites very quickly with it’s ! syntax (Everyone goes on about privacy, but this is pretty much it’s best feature). Google results are consistently the worst for me if I’m hitting multiple search engines

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

Even back when I used Reddit, I had such a burning hate against Reddit results that I blacklisted them. So this is actually improving things for me, as I use DDG by default.

As such I hope that this decision becomes another nail in each of their (Google and Reddit’s) coffins.

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