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?
Hey, does that mean we're finally googleable? That's pretty cool.
My guess is it'll vary instance by instance. You have to get on Google's radar to start search your content.
Take that, Stack Overflow! Programming.dev on deck!!!! Let's gooooooo
I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a "programming reddit" of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.
The only thing holding it back is probably a setting for showing local communities by default, when logged out browsing. Whenever that feature arrives in Lemmy then 👌
Funnily enough my own instance has a such a bad SEO that when I searched up my username (to find out what is out there) I found all other instances my comments got copied to but not my own freaking instance.
Oh well. Yes Google does index instances but how well and often is another story.
I honestly don't think Google crawlers knows how to index the fediverse but I am kind of talking out of my ass rn.
Fediverse is just another website. It literally finds my username on many other instances posts got replicated to.
So you know those buttons at the top of Google search results?
Images, News, Videos, etc?
You'll never guess what new button they're testing out now.
https://imgur.com/a/bnOv1W7
One time I was looking up a question related to obsidian MD, only to find out there was a post about my exact issue, I open it, I've already upvoted it. I read closer, it's my own post from 6mo ago.
Your first mistake was unironically using google to search for anything in 2023.
Happens to me all the time with my Networking, Fortinet, Ansible, and Cisco subreddits, and that’s exactly why I’m hesitant to purge and delete my account.
That and I haven’t found comparable communities here.
Maybe try SearXNG?
https://github.com/searxng/searxng
https://searx.space/
Or maybe something like https://perplexity.ai to point towards where to look
How do I make DDG only returns results from lemmy. Usually you can make it only return results from a specific website (like reddit.com) but you can't do that because of different instances.
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.
