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Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy (www.search-lemmy.com)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by marsara9@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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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[-] TheBrainGuy@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago

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

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Due to a one of my primary goals of having links open in your home instance, you can only search a single instance at a time.

There's an open issue about this though but it requires some changes to Lemmy itself to work.

[-] whzfux@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 years ago

Not wanting to undermine your excellent work, what would be the specific advantage yet, compared to searching for communities / posts via the lemmy page?

I am completly New to lemmy or reddit and still searching for a nice and easy way to find relevant threads for me

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

The built in search, well sucks. Search for "Not undermine wanting" and you won't be able to find your comment. Essentially:

All words are required
The order of each of the search terms is important
The search results here provide no ranking.
The searching here is relatively slow. (now some queries on my site are slow as well, but most should be fast)

[-] whzfux@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 years ago

Ahhh i think i got it - so it is not a search for communities but for full text

It then makes sense to me why i need toselecft an instance beforehand.

[-] Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 years ago

Nobody has mentioned it yet, but https://fedi-search.com/ already exists

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

Yes but that search doesn't take you to the instance that you are logged into already. Which is one of my main goals with this site. While that did give me the inspiration for this and has the power of Google behind it, it lacks knowledge about how the fediverse actually works.

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[-] daq@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 years ago

This project dead?

[-] sauron@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Missed opportunity to name it "Loogle"

[-] Hellnikko@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Holy shit. This is the best thing.

[-] Domille@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 years ago

this is awesome and very needed. Thank you.

[-] csolisr@communities.azkware.net 3 points 2 years ago

Wondering if this will see the same backlash that Mastodon had when users were planning to add a search engine - many users moved to Mastodon specifically because their posts are unsearchable by default, and that prevents some dogpiling that was common on Twitter.

[-] tenth@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

Great heads up

I just don’t get why people would join SOCIAL media if they don’t want to their posts public. Its like having a group meeting in the middle of a public square and complain people saw them

Maybe they should just use discord or or private communities instead

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've already got some complaints about that. You can see one of the issues raised on GitHub.

At the moment, I'm only picking up mastodon posts that are federated to Lemmy, but you can't choose Mastodon as a preferred-instance, yet. When and/if I decide to add Mastodon support, I'll reach out to the admins over there to get feedback first.

Edit and note to any server admin: If you want to block the crawler from hitting your site, just add lemmy-search to your robots.txt and crawling will be prevented. But this doesn't stop cross-federation posts from being picked up on another instance.

[-] tenth@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Thats very considerate of you

Please don’t take those complaints as negative feedback. I don’t think Lemmy is designed to be private and your search engine would be a great of help to the whole community.

By the way, do you plan to create a community to discuss about your search engine? Maybe users can help you with testing or report issues or improvement

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

I've got a discord page up and going that is invite only right now. No offense to anyone here but i didn't want to be overwhelmed with users joining in on the discord chat just yet. If you want to help contribute or even just test you can easily find me on discord, and I'll give you an invite.

[-] Coelacanth@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Starting a Search-Lemmy community here might be good for visibility too.

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[-] puddlexplorer@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If I use this search engine instead of the one on the website, does it mean it would put less strain on the server? Yeah, I'm not quite techy.

If so, I guess this a big is step.

Fine addition to my keyword/bookmarks library.

All I need now is the option to sort by New.

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

If I use this search engine instead of the one on the website, does it mean it would put less strain on the server? Yeah, I’m not quite techy.

Yes. Searches on my site only hit my server and don't touch your home server unless you click on a link.

[-] Hutchpd@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

Can it filter NSFW posts? As on Reddit you can search "pussy nsfw:no" and get pictures of cats.

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

Not yet but I can add this feature

[-] burak@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Can you add a nsfw:only filter while you’re at it? :)

[-] hemko@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

And make it default ;-)

[-] Botree@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago

go to horny jail

[-] Hutchpd@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

It's nsfw:yes on Reddit 😂

[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 2 years ago

Why do I learn about this now that I pretty much don't care?

[-] theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago

Holy fuck I've been thinking about how annoying it is that I can't search lemmy for a few days now - and here you are suddenly just handing the tool I want to me with features that I didn't even think about. THANK YOU SO MUCH. Adding this post to my saved.

[-] Azzu@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

This is great! I was so annoyed by the links not going to my home instance that I made this userscript (Lemmy post)! It rewrites all links on all websites to always point to your home instance.

Could be a nice addition for everyone that likes this website :)

[-] anders@rytter.me 2 points 2 years ago

@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.

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

Oh wanted to add, as a workaround for now you can set your home instance to lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Because of how the fediverse works, searching the larger older instances should have a fairly complete copy of content.

Once I do "fix" this though, note that you may click on a link and get a 404 page. As that post may not be on your home instance.

One rule I will always follow for this project is that if I display a link, that link MUST take you to your home instance and that link MUST point to the post in question (but I cannot guarantee that you won't get an error, just that you won't be taken to a completely different post)

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[-] labbbb 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Nice! It doesn't work.

[-] Historical_General@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

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).