Hopefully this kind of content is ok here. Up until recently, when I would be searching for some kind of technical info, the top (and best) results would usually all be Reddit posts. I was very pleasantly surprised to do that this time and find a Lemmy post instead!
...It did happen to be a post from me, so unfortunately didn't answer my question at all, but I still thought it was really neat and wanted to share. Has anyone else seen Lemmy stuff getting indexed and turning up in their search results?
That's a problem I notice with Lemmy. You can point search engines at specific instances but not all instances which makes finding content that's only present on Lemmy very difficult.
Yup.
lemmyseems to work okay, but it would miss something like !programming.dev since it doesn't have lemmy in the name.If you know where the community is hosted, you can probably do
site:instanceand get decent results.What we really need is a better integrated search inside lemmy. That way I won't feel the need to use a search engine as often. If that works, perhaps someone could make a single site that tracks all popular communities (just post comment, not comments) for better SEO, and then links to the actual posts. Kind of like those StackOverflow copy sites that I keep running into.
Crawling and indexing lemmy inter-instance would be an incredible boon to discoverability on the platform.