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HOW can we coax search-engines in to being able to do the simple "lemmy" + "search word" thing..? (upload.wikimedia.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 7 points 1 year 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.

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