this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025

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Ask Lemmy

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240

HOW can we coax search-engines in to being able to do the simple "lemmy" + "search word" thing..? (upload.wikimedia.org)

submitted 1 week ago by JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

62 comments fedilink hide all child comments

NOTE: the late "Lemmy" is a beloved Brit* musician from an enjoyable rock band, perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues? (sorry, I just didn't know him very well; kinda before my time)

Okay, what I'm trying to explain here is how we search for things and how we find them, particularly when we include the magical word: "Lemmy" in our searches.

For example-- I can just half-awake, lazily type something like "reddit" + search term, and BOOM! Robert's your avuncular figure.**

Now, by comparison, hopping on an instance, so far I've found that searches within the Lemmysphere are remarkably strong. (well, at least for lemm.ee; I love my instance)

Unfortunately, that's not how most people search and find us, which more typically involves Google, etc.

Hence my question, laddies & lassies-- i.e. is there anything we can do to influence how this search-stuff works...?

* see, I always find a way to relate things back to Europe, haha

** like "there you go," ie. "Bob's your uncle," a classic Brit pub-phrase

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[–] WanderingShadow@lemmy.world 52 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Reddit is all on one domain, so a search on that is a fairly simple thing to do. Lemmy is a lot of different inter-connected sites, most of which don't even contain "Lemmy" in their name, making it a much more difficult ask.

[–] JWBananas@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And to make matters worse, because all of those domains have a good chunk of nearly identical content, they end up appearing like SEO content farm spam to the algorithm. It's like all those sites that used to clone Stack Overflow back in the day.

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[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Lemmy is a lot of different inter-connected sites, most of which don’t even contain “Lemmy” in their name, making it a much more difficult ask.

A search engine could easily enough set up their own Lemmy server to search from. Same with Mastodon.

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

[–] darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A search engine could easily enough set up their own Lemmy server to search from. Same with Mastodon.

Sure, but if Google actually did that, a lot of people here would go apeshit about them profiting from this content.

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'd go apeshit happy that they see us as relevant

[–] President@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago

I love how reading through this comment thread pretty much follows my internal monologue...

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 4 points 1 week ago

As someone on mbin rather than lemmy, lemmy isn't even all of us.

[–] mycelium_underground@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

And that's why it's so cool that Kagi has an option to limit your search to the fediverse.

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[–] venusaur@lemmy.world 52 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Motörhead ≠ Led Zeppelin

[–] AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah... I love both but Led Zep is way more of a hippie rock vibe and motorhead is like biker rock

[–] venusaur@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah I’ll smoke a joint to Zep but I’ll chug a Guinness to Motörhead

[–] lukstru@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

You mean that zeppelin was high in the clouds and motorhead are oil heads?

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[–] mac@lemm.ee 41 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Kagi (a paid search engine) has a "fediverse forums" filter option.

[–] mycelium_underground@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And the search actually returns relevant results, not a bunch of ads. If you have used free search your whole life, it kind of sucks to pay for it, but I would rather pay for searching than be a product people pay for every time I search. It doesn't take much thought to see why being the product will always lead to a worse search platform.

[–] tal 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Honestly, it shouldn't cost that much for free search engines to build in

shouldn't add a lot of compute load or anything. I expect that what Kagi did was to run a spider to build a list of hostnames and then to basically do a site search on a huge number of sites. If there's demand, other search engines could provide similar functionality.

[–] DrainKikoLake@lemmy.ca 34 points 1 week ago

"-music" should mostly do the trick... unless you're looking for music.

[–] Jarix@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

For anyone who doesnt know Lemmy, just want to say hes easy to get a bad first impression of.

He was really well respected by people in music and was a good soul.

Theres an good documentary on him i think was on netflix.

Also My favourite clip of him

Also fun fact, he was a roadie for Jimmy Hendrix

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

I met him once or twice whenever my friends and I would end up at The Rainbow on sunset. It was always an interesting place to visit. Before he passed, you always knew Lemmy would be there. But you never knew who else you'd run into.

[–] semisimian@startrek.website 4 points 1 week ago

"Screw 'em, do what you want" shall be the whole of the law.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

He was really well respected by people in music and was a good soul.

Yeah, I got that sense, and that there was a collective sadness when he passed.

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[–] exixx@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Who would win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or god?

[–] DadVolante@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ha! Trick question.

[–] teslasaur@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah. Lemmy would say "fuck that, you want rum and coke instead, mate?"

[–] GlenRambo@jlai.lu 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Can we en-mass (all 20 of us) suggest a !bang to DDG?

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago

I'm down. Interested in how it will work though. Do we want it to be lemmy.world, lemm.ee, everything? Do you constantly add more instances?

[–] Tencho@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Whats the email i need to send the request to.

[–] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

One option is by fitering and combining multiple site, as I show in that post here:)

https://mander.xyz/post/7198692

[–] neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

Neat and simple. Thanks.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

site:lemmy.world It may not be great, but most content ends up there.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe by sheer volume, but it also kinda defeats the aim of the Lemmysphere and FV as I understand it.

And you know, there are some other major instances besides LW. If you look at the classic 'globe-chart' I think that's proven out.

But, I think you're also kinda acknowledging that, so not trying to pick a fight with you or anything. :S

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh yea, totally agree. It's a terrible solution, but it is a solution. I would much prefer something like SearXNG being able to array filter all Fediverse domains.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago

Ooh, that's right!
SearXNG, yes!

Now, I've heard nothing but good things about it, and it seemed to work NICELY when I last tried it.

Ugh, TBH, I'm *not* very smart upon this stuff. Hopefully we as a group can improve the situation, tho..?

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[–] kreynen@kbin.melroy.org 7 points 1 week ago

@JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee isn't part of the point of ActivityPub to avoid vendor lockin/single point of billionaire enshittification? I read and interact with a fair amount of Lemmy content through an Mbin instance.

You can already limit Google using site:[DOMAIN].

If every ActivityPub driven service used a common TLD like .edus, you'd be able to limit results to that facet of Google's index, they don't. If they did, we'd be back to a single point of failure.

Google supports limiting searches to content using a Creative Commons license based on the licensing metadata in the URL. ActivityPub content already has the metadata, but it took a decade to generate enough content before Google offered the option to filter searches by CC-BY-SA... and Google was a VERY different company back then.

[–] Lojcs@lemm.ee 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ecosia is better for this than google

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[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago

Lemmy is god

[–] craig9@lemm.ee 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I just did some experimenting, and in duckduckgo.com at least, searches like this work quite well:

"Best CPU (site:lemm.ee OR site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ca)"

Not exactly user friendly, but it's a starting point. At least two ways forward:

A browser plugin with a config page allowing you to select/deselect your favourite instances, and make a bang operator to suit: e.g. "!lemmy"
Petition search engines to do this themselves.

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[–] dparticiple@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This would be a great Kagi lens (https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html ), perhaps for the Fediverse generally, rather than just for Lemmy. They already have one for Reddit, as well as a 'small web' one focused on small sites and non-commercial material.

[–] tal 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As someone else pointed out above, they have had a search lens to do this for some time. It's called "Fediverse Forums".

[–] dparticiple@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I hadn't noticed that until now. Thanks!

[–] tal 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

No problem. I ignore most of the extra features they provide

my interest in them is really for the privacy aspect

and the ability to search the Threadiverse is one of the very few extra features that I actually make meaningful use of.

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Double check me on this, but I think they have a "-site:" parameter that you can use in your searches.

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago

the minus would remove sites. Useful it you want to do X -site:reddit.com but that leaves all that isn't reddit.

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[–] LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I just watched Last of Us (inspired by the game) featuring Pedro Pascal. Looks very similar to Lemmy.

[–] SchwertImStein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

[–] mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tw5_9Zxy2U

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

I'm not generally a huge fan of HM, but I can feel the energy! Thanks for the share.

[–] Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Every aspect of this picture is cool

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