Reddit is all on one domain, so a search on that is a fairly simple thing to do. Lemmy is a lot of different inter-connected sites, most of which don't even contain "Lemmy" in their name, making it a much more difficult ask.
post
Motörhead ≠ Led Zeppelin
Yeah... I love both but Led Zep is way more of a hippie rock vibe and motorhead is like biker rock
Kagi (a paid search engine) has a "fediverse forums" filter option.


And the search actually returns relevant results, not a bunch of ads. If you have used free search your whole life, it kind of sucks to pay for it, but I would rather pay for searching than be a product people pay for every time I search. It doesn't take much thought to see why being the product will always lead to a worse search platform.
Honestly, it shouldn't cost that much for free search engines to build in
shouldn't add a lot of compute load or anything. I expect that what Kagi did was to run a spider to build a list of hostnames and then to basically do a site search on a huge number of sites. If there's demand, other search engines could provide similar functionality.
For anyone who doesnt know Lemmy, just want to say hes easy to get a bad first impression of.
He was really well respected by people in music and was a good soul.
Theres an good documentary on him i think was on netflix.
Also fun fact, he was a roadie for Jimmy Hendrix
I met him once or twice whenever my friends and I would end up at The Rainbow on sunset. It was always an interesting place to visit. Before he passed, you always knew Lemmy would be there. But you never knew who else you'd run into.
He was really well respected by people in music and was a good soul.
Yeah, I got that sense, and that there was a collective sadness when he passed.
Who would win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or god?
Can we en-mass (all 20 of us) suggest a !bang to DDG?
One option is by fitering and combining multiple site, as I show in that post here:)
site:lemmy.world It may not be great, but most content ends up there.
Maybe by sheer volume, but it also kinda defeats the aim of the Lemmysphere and FV as I understand it.
And you know, there are some other major instances besides LW. If you look at the classic 'globe-chart' I think that's proven out.
But, I think you're also kinda acknowledging that, so not trying to pick a fight with you or anything. :S
Oh yea, totally agree. It's a terrible solution, but it is a solution. I would much prefer something like SearXNG being able to array filter all Fediverse domains.
@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.
Ecosia is better for this than google
I just did some experimenting, and in duckduckgo.com at least, searches like this work quite well:
"Best CPU (site:lemm.ee OR site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ca)"
Not exactly user friendly, but it's a starting point. At least two ways forward:
-
A browser plugin with a config page allowing you to select/deselect your favourite instances, and make a bang operator to suit: e.g. "!lemmy"
-
Petition search engines to do this themselves.
This would be a great Kagi lens (https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html ), perhaps for the Fediverse generally, rather than just for Lemmy. They already have one for Reddit, as well as a 'small web' one focused on small sites and non-commercial material.
As someone else pointed out above, they have had a search lens to do this for some time. It's called "Fediverse Forums".
I hadn't noticed that until now. Thanks!
Double check me on this, but I think they have a "-site:" parameter that you can use in your searches.
the minus would remove sites. Useful it you want to do X -site:reddit.com but that leaves all that isn't reddit.
The only reason it works for Reddit is because they have a singular domain name you can site search and the context engine is good enough to know you're requesting a site search of www.reddit.com. Adding "Lemmy" to your query doesn't help, but adding the URL to an instance does. Such as "thing I want to search Lemmy.World" actually results in hits on Lemmy.World and other instances directly linked to from it. You can do it with any instance you want. You could even add "site:URL" to make sure it's doing the right kind of search if it doesn't understand the context.
perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues

top 50 comments