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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.

WanderingVentra ,

Godamnit Meta… Lol

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 ,

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

daniskarma ,

Problem is that we’ll probably need a dedicated search engine for that. As answers are spread in lots of instances, some of them without “lemmy” in the name, I assume.

tea ,

Seems like a solvable problem though. We have a list of federated servers inately built into activitypub, right? Just need to tag results from those servers as being linked to a “lemmy” keyword search.

I’m sure I’m oversimplifying it, but all the pieces are there, just need search engines to be smart about how they index. Since there are a couple of federation based models that would be good to index, not just lemmy, it would probably behoove them to figure it out.

Sparky ,
@Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

This might be a hot take, but I hope that we as a platform are toxic enough to advertisers so that big tech’s enshittification and advertising never becomes a problem.

tea ,

As I understand it, Lemmy, being FOSS, is pretty immune to this since there are no big tech shareholders to appease. Lemmy is susceptible to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) via something like Threads, however.

capital ,

Twitter still has advertisers.

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.

daniskarma ,

To be fair, Reddit is no longer that good of a source for answers in the later years.

Quality drop in comments is insane. Sometimes it looks like Quora.

Kecessa ,

I was looking for Bluetooth speakers recommendations and it’s the first time I really noticed “generic bot replies” like “I’ve got this great product to recommend, not only is it good but it offers great sound quality as well! The product is [link to Amazon page]”

Gotta start searching using “before:” to get quality results…

5oap10116 ,

Am I bbbrrrregnant?

BeigeAgenda ,
@BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca avatar

If we consider all possible outcomes on a galaxy scale, then No.

villainy ,

Also my collection of hobbies seems to match up well with the people who nuked their post history after the API-ocalypse. Even when I get good search results I click through and… so many deleted comments…

Mnemnosyne ,

It irritates me that so many forums and media sites allow you to edit your posts at will. There’s one site I go to that I like very much - it has a 5 minute edit window, and after that, your post can no longer be edited. You can’t change what you said, pretend you never said things, etc, once you say something it remains. It would be nice if more sites were like that. Or at least, if you edit/delete something, for there to be an option to check the history to see what it used to be, so if you try to delete some comment you made people can still check it. Whether it’s informational, or it’s because you’re trying to hide something you said that you realize was actually super shitty and people are getting angry at you for it, I prefer things to stick.

werefreeatlast ,

Lemmy Will be king soon…is there a Lemmy search engine?

Kowowow ,

They should include reddit in the list of search engines that don’t work well with reddit

SteveFromMySpace ,

Enshittification continues but now it’s trying to enshittify competitors indirectly instead of altering their own products.

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.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

Reddit truly is making things awful.

They’re no longer interested in driving traffic to the site, is my guess. They’re far more interested in devising new ways to extract rents from the existing participant base. So rather than pay Google to prioritize their site, or incentivize Google to link to their site with internal content hygenie techniques, now they’re getting paid by Google to exclusively serve up content.

It’s useless.

The sheer volume of junk content, the amount of content that just shows up as deleted or archived, and the rate at which I’m served “Reddit” as a source of data when there’s no conceivable reason why it should be near the top of my search list is very frustrating.

5oap10116 ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/941a7b15-cf66-407a-b8a6-d0c0f6b98f94.png

5oap10116 ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/adcb0b2d-0d83-4881-aa82-fa74937e0ec0.png

sag ,

Fuck You Reddit

_haha_oh_wow_ ,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

Weird, most of the results I get from Google’s search are from Quora (and they fucking suck). Google as a search engine has been going downhill for a while now. Reddit has becomes an increasingly spammy shithole full of corporate and political astroturfing too.

cmrn ,

Every time I click a Reddit link now it’s just “download the app to verify your age” regardless of what it is

Wolf314159 ,

I feel your pain.

I edit the URL to remove the first part of the URL and replace it with “old.reddit.com”. That still seems to work, last I checked, but I fully expect it to be killed any day now.

PraiseTheSoup ,

There’s a firefox extension “old reddit redirect” that’ll do this for you. Been using it for years. But yeah any day now I expect old reddit to be offline.

Bookmeat ,

Good. They can both die in a fire.

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

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

russjr08 ,

We believe in the open internet, but we do not believe in the misuse of public content.

That’s real rich, coming from Reddit.

capital ,

You’d probably feel differently if it were your service. Should you be able to control who scrapes your sites or should that be all or nothing?

For the record, I fucking hate what the internet is becoming. I naively believed that even if shit got cordoned off into the walled gardens that are mobile phone apps, the web would remain as open as it was. This is a terrible sign of things to come.

reddig33 ,

No, I wouldn’t feel differently. In fact letting search engines scrape and point to your content is what leads people to your site. It’s free advertising. If you’re going to let one search engine in, you should let them all in. If you want to be public, be public. Otherwise put up a login firewall and go private.

capital ,

It’s not just search engines. Lots of people on Mastodon were using robots.txt to block ChatGPT (and any other LLM company they knew of) from scraping their sites/blogs.

I disagree, to a point. I want to be able to control my services to the greatest extent possible, including picking who scrapes me.

On the other hand, orgs as large as Google doing this poses a real threat to how the internet works right now which I hate.

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.

todd_bonzalez ,

Oh good, I can’t view most reddit threads without an account anymore, so it’ll be nice to see those results go away.

Imgonnatrythis ,

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

Reminder that Kagi searches Lemmy which is great.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

Kagi

Ah, yes. The “Fuck you, Pay me” search engine.

capital ,

A service that gasp costs money???

It surfaces better results for me than others so I’m paying for a service that I gain benefit from. Feel free not to…

Wolfram ,

It’s a paid service that in return respects privacy, and has results as good as Google’s.

Google doesn’t say “Fuck you, Pay me” because you are the product.

Imgonnatrythis ,

I like where I stand in that model. I’ve tried the alternatives and have found genuine value in what I’m paying for. Lemmy loves turning its nose up at Kagi because “money” but they’ve gone out of their way to index the fediverse where most have ignored us. I’m an anonymous Kagi user I pay through a third party using a crypto account and I couldn’t be happier - they now have a lower tiered payment plan that is affordable for me.

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