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.
    • 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.

  • DankMemeMachine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    552·
    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.

    • Konala Koala@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year 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.

  • Quetzacoatl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    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.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      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.

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      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.

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      “some search string instance:lemmy.world”.

      Keywords are:

      instance:<instance name>

      community:!<community name>@<instance name>

      and

      author:@<author name>@<instance name>.

  • lionkoy5555@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    hmm the site is not loading for me, i’m from the Philippines if that matters. It just keeps on loading. Will try again

    • BitOneZero @ .world@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      For micro/personal server runners

      Having to send out all those posts, comments, likes is killing the servers holding all the content. The project leaders really need to make an announcement about the performance problems, they are systemic.

        • BitOneZero @ .world@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          Federation protocol implementation is poorly optimized, it does SQL lookup for the person every incoming post/comment/like, checks the community if they are banned, all of this with zero caching. HTTP outbound is also very simple design that only now some logic to detect dead peer servers is being added, etc.