this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
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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](/c/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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[–] anders@rytter.me 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

@marsara9 would be cool if it had the ability to search through all instances. don't know if thats possible

[–] marsara9@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Eventually. I'm waiting on a bug in Lemmy itself to be fixed. Mainly once I can post a link to a post here and anyone can click on it without leaving their home instance.

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[–] KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Cooooooool 😎

[–] daq@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 10 months ago

This project dead?

[–] nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can we only search by title with this? I'm getting a lot of unrelated results.

[–] marsara9@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

It searches the title and body. It also automatically searches for similar words like. Like 'bike', 'biking', 'bikes' (aka stemming). Granted though, I'm still improving the page ranking as time goes on.

[–] CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The results are different depending on which preferred instance I select. Is that the correct behavior?

[–] marsara9@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Correct. As I can only provide links to posts that are on your selected home instance. Eventually I'll change this but you'll get a 404 page for links that aren't on your home instance, but see my P.S. below.

P.s. there have been changes to the Lemmy API that have prevented me from getting updates for about a month now. So most of the results you're seeing are from old posts only. Until I can rebuild the crawler or find a new API there won't be any new content.

This looks good, I just found an old (3 year old post - I didn't even know Lemmy was around back then!) and commented on it. There were also funnily two other recent comments (one from 2 months ago and another 3 months old).

[–] seeCseas@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I see an error saying I've been blocked - i never had that problem with fedisearch!

[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can it be made to search in the comments? Right now, I'm finding more results when I use the search function inside lemmy.world than if I use this

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

Oh thank you, this is great!

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

oh wow this is great. wish it were easy to use this search from a lemmy instance and browse the results from within.

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[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

is this a crawler or does it index via mass federation? Or is it using API calls?

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[–] Briguy24@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Awesome work! Thank you!

[–] helloharu@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

This is amazing, nice work! My only criticism at the moment is that on the search results page, the input becomes so squashed that it becomes pointless to use and I’ve gone back to the main screen to redo searches. Giving it its own row, and the search button and drop down their own. should fix that easily.

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[–] Frenchy@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago
[–] epsilonneighbor@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Absolutely fantastic- Thank you!!

[–] hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

Awesome! Thanks!

[–] TheBrainGuy@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Cool! Is there a way to search all instances at once?

[–] Remontoire@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago
[–] imrichyouknow@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

I would really like to see this get integrated into SearXNG

[–] labbbb@thelemmy.club 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Nice! It doesn't work.

[–] dot20@lemmy.world -1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Why the choice for a .com domain? Is this a commercial project?

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