this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
40 points (93.5% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26279 readers
1435 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I was wondering if the search engines are indexing the fediverse. Because recently Google search became so bad so I was always putting Reddit at the end to get some not so generic results and I haven't even noticed to get any replies pointing to the fediverse ever. So I was wondering if search engines were actually indexing the content here?

top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, but keep in mind top level domains like .world .ai .life and similar are heavily punished by the search algorithm.

So let's say you search for "best Android apps 2023" and there's a Lemmy.world post with this exact title and a great list of apps, versus a clickbait techblog written by ChatGPT and a .com domain... The techblog will very likely be ranked higher.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One good thing about Reddit is that one could add a "site:reddit.com" at the end of each Google search to improve the results.

This won't work as well with Lemmy (since it's all a bunch of different domains). Hope that in the future a feature like this is implemented to search across the fediverse

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

Yeah, perhaps another qualifier that's, say, specifies the protocol, e.g. Activity Pub? Would be handy

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

They certainly are!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Some platforms like Mastodon allow individual users to discourage search engines from indexing their profile. But, by default, as far as I know all platforms allow indexing. Lemmy seems to not provide any option to control this kind of thing so everything should get indexed.

The thing is, using "thingtosearch reddit" you're not using any search engine properly, that's kind of a hack. What you would do is actually "thingtosearch site:reddit.com" to limit searches to a specific site. This works with any site, of course, so you could for example do "thingtosearch site:feddit.it" (that's my instance), and you will get specific results (which actually might include results from other instances, due to how this indexing works, even though they will be displayed from the site of the instance you specified). (I just noticed btw that DuckDuckGo doesn't list anything for site:myinstance... well, that's strange, Google has no problem.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo uses their own web crawlers along with a few others (but not google's). Probably just haven't indexed it yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Sure they are. But the amount of info in the fediverse right now is minuscule to say R*ddit. It will take time and growth before we start seeing fediverse stuff show up regularly in search.

load more comments
view more: next ›