this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy (www.search-lemmy.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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:[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]).
    • Author -- Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as: author:@[email protected].
  • 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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can we only search by title with this? I'm getting a lot of unrelated results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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).

[–] labbbb 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Nice! It doesn't work.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

Genshin instance:https://lemmit.online/

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Well, we were probably already due or going on past due for something to best replace the old "site:reddit.com" with "site:lemmy.world" for instance.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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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