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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.

(page 2) 33 comments
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[-] imrichyouknow@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

I would really like to see this get integrated into SearXNG

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

class

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

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

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

Thanks for this! I was trying to figure out how to best replace the old "site:reddit.com" trick, and it did not quite work with lemmy with how it is federated. I hope that longer term we can get an "all" tab on lemmy that truly tries to pull from as many of the federated sites as possible to get us closer to the Reddit experience. I tried to do some research on extreme heat clothing due to the wet bulb temps in my area but r/mensfashion and most other clothing reddits still seemed private, maybe I can try searching with your solution now.

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

Looks like your comment got triple posted. The lemmy instances are getting slammed lol

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[-] nieceandtows@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

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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[-] nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] Mermitian@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

Really nice work! I was excited since we talked about it, and it definitely delivers imo!

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

Ya, now if everyone can stop finding bugs! So I can take some time off. /jk

[-] WheeGeetheCat@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

take time off whenever you need :D Im sure people would rather you go far than go fast

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

Awesome! Thanks!

[-] CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 1 points 2 years ago

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

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

With the new third party apps coming up, maybe they can use your search engine. TAP connectivity!

[-] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

Can you tell me how to use search-lemmy to find this post that I created yesterday?

Getting started with net-snmp in C++

When searching for "snmp" I get zero results. When searching for "net-snmp", I get 37 unrelated results, none of which is my post.

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

It might not have been crawled yet. The search engine will periodically search for new content but this isn't instant. So it may take a day or two to find it.

[-] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

still not working - is this possibly because of the server being overloaded & the crawl not working? relevant query

PS: is it too much load on your search engine to search across all instances by default? Atm it auto-selects the first in the dropdown list as the preferred instance.

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[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

P.S. to those trying to use a filter, I have a bug that's been discovered: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/13

Long story short, make sure to put your query first and the filter at the end (with no space between the simicolon)

[-] davidgro@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

Still not working for me, my test query (following the example's format) is:

Genshin instance:https://lemmit.online/

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

Nevermind, found the issue already. I should have a fix uploaded tomorrow. Looks like all instance lookups are failing.

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[-] Quetzacoatl@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

make those results sort- and exportable (CSV, JSON, XML or the like), and you could be the new redditsearch.io. especially filtering results by different community/time/author would be great, and sorting by length/upvotes. what was that site with reddit post statistics called again? I know, this all might be further out, and wrangling bugs, the changing API and cloudflare might be more pressing issues, but maybe put it on the feature request list somewhere? all the best, and thank you for making this!

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

There is a public API now. While I won't support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.

When you search for posts you're just matching against the title or body. For communities it's searching the posts within that community.

There's also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.

So I'm not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I'd share.

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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
295 points (97.1% liked)

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