Asklemmy

49759 readers

416 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

How is the search functionality in Lemmy? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by nobloat@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The way I use reddit is usually for recommendations, reviews, technical problems, etc. One main way to do this is to search a subreddit or all of reddit to see if the answer is already there. Is there a way to have a similar search on Lemmy ? I can't seem to get this to work. It only searches for communities and not posts within them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'll echo the suggestion from another commenter to post future help questions in !lemmy@lemmy.ml. This sub is for asking lemmings about other stuff... analogous to /r/AskReddit/.

But to summarize Lemmy's search, it's confusing and primitive.

It's confusing because of Federation. Each instance searches its local database, which means equivalent searches from different instances are likely to return different results. Searching a popular community on a well-established instance that has been around a long while will be pretty reliable. But an instance that got started last week is going to be missing a lot of older stuff, and there's a lot of instances like that. I recommend searching the home instance for the community rather than your home instance as a user. That will ensure that you get the full resultset for that community... though it means searching several communities may require visiting several different instances.
It's primitive because it's "just" postgres search. Most searchboxes we interact with on a day to day basis are backed by extremely sophisticated search infrastructure that has sophisticated relevance ranking that is powered by past searches... the system keeps track of how people search and modifies search results when it sees that a result is popular. Lemmy search is just using a "plain" database search, the approach to ranking is pretty simple, and it has no idea how helpful a result has been in the past. If there are few enough results that you can scroll through them all yourself that doesn't matter much... but if a search returns hundreds or thousands of results... expect them to be ordered in a not very useful way.

I feel like using an external search engine is probably a better approach, but that's not super simple either. I haven't found search strings that I'm totally happy with.

[–] nobloat@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Thank you! I will post any future technical questions there as suggested. Thanks for the detailed answer. I was asking because I didn't find any search capabilities in the app I used, so I will stick to web version for searches until apps implement it.