2y ago

That feeling when you're googling the answer to some technical question, and your own Lemmy post appears 4 results down.

Hopefully this kind of content is ok here. Up until recently, when I would be searching for some kind of technical info, the top (and best) results would usually all be Reddit posts. I was very pleasantly surprised to do that this time and find a Lemmy post instead!

...It did happen to be a post from me, so unfortunately didn't answer my question at all, but I still thought it was really neat and wanted to share. Has anyone else seen Lemmy stuff getting indexed and turning up in their search results?

79 comments

Pretty cool to start seeing Lemmy posts in search results
- Gotta keep this up! So much of my google results are Reddit forum posts
  
  At least now I'm starting to see those results as "Fuck /u/Spezz This post removed by "
  
  So many Reddit posts are removed and useless. And often these posts used to be the main answer. I don't bother much with Redditt anymore. It's not the knowledgebase it used to be. Will likely never be again.
  Some questions I "reask" here on Lemmy and get decent replies. Thus building a new knowledgebase.
- This could be a big help to growing the overall threadiverse community since growth after the reddit bump has stalled. Not saying growth is intrinsically the goal, but rather that organic rather than force growth (which is how we got most of the users here) is preferable
- Hope the indexed instances don't get taken down years down the road, or have some sort of independent archive to consult later.
  
  That's my biggest worry, however I've been programming for like 15 years now and there are forums I posted to that no longer exist, so I think its just a symptom of information as a whole.
  Reddit was the bastion for this kind if stuff for a long time, and now there are a bunch of posts by this guy named [deleted] that have no post body so make of that what you will

Hey, does that mean we're finally googleable? That's pretty cool.
- My guess is it'll vary instance by instance. You have to get on Google's radar to start search your content.
  
  And that happens by people linking to it.
- Time to start injecting my posts with SEO nonsense
  
  Reddit programming funny Google lemmy search results...
  Don't mind me.

You know it's a unique question when lemmy is on the front page.
- Google: I don't know, ask these nerds.

Take that, Stack Overflow! Programming.dev on deck!!!! Let's gooooooo
- I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a "programming reddit" of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.
  The only thing holding it back is probably a setting for showing local communities by default, when logged out browsing. Whenever that feature arrives in Lemmy then 👌
  
  Any recommended communities in programming.dev?
  
  hm. when I test in a private browsing mode it shows Local by default. That doesn't happen for you?
  also:
  I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a “programming reddit” of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.
  is exactly what I was going for when I created the instance so I'm glad to see others think it could succeed!

Lemmception
- Please tell me that's how you got here 😂
  
  lol, I searched for this post title 😛

I've noticed Lemmy appearing more in search results already. It's nice

Quick reminder that Google's search results are partially impacted by your location, language, device type, search history and cookies.
Source: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/12412910?sjid=12467677493375888160-EU
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/10909618?sjid=12467677493375888160-EU#zippy=%2Chow-to-control-your-search-history
- While true, I just tried in an incognito window and the post was #5
  
  Incognito window
  Oh, my sweet summer child.

Huh did Google start indexing lemmy?
- Funnily enough my own instance has a such a bad SEO that when I searched up my username (to find out what is out there) I found all other instances my comments got copied to but not my own freaking instance.
  Oh well. Yes Google does index instances but how well and often is another story.
  
  Some instances disabled crawling, namely lemmy.ca
  
  Maybe google downranks db0 instance like it does other pirate sites?
  
  I honestly don't think Google crawlers knows how to index the fediverse but I am kind of talking out of my ass rn.
- So I thought the biggest issue with Lemmy and Google's pagerank is that federated content looks a lot like that blogspam that just aggregates content from elsewhere.
  Perhaps they're adapting things

‘Googling something’, as he enters the most specific question ever.
- I get it. Finding the answers to super niche questions is just about the only thing I still go to reddit for.

So you know those buttons at the top of Google search results?
Images, News, Videos, etc?
You'll never guess what new button they're testing out now.
https://imgur.com/a/bnOv1W7
- It's not just reddit. They're AI assisted buttons with more tabs for commons searches. Many people add "reddit" after a search to find answers specifically on reddit. It's also catered differently per user so you might see TikTok or Quora as other buttons up top as well.
  Google search results will also slightly vary among users.

there was this movie I liked a lot that I found hard to find people to discuss it with. I talked to a couple people about it on reddit one time, but that was really the extent of the discussions. Eventually I saw the movie again on TV and it got me wondering if there was anymore more info about it, like theories or whatever. So I Google it and come across this thread that looked interesting, and as I'm reading through I thought that this person knows what they're talking about and has some good ideas. Eventually I realize it was my own comments I was looking at from before, I just didn't recognize them at first. I'm actually retarded
- Wow this is so insightful this guy must be really cool and smart
  Wait a minute…
- Probably best not to use an ableist slur
- Is it Operation Sandman ?

I’ve noticed that the quality of the questions and answers on technical topics has gotten noticeably worse since July. Not surprising these types of users would move away from Lemmy first. On the Ubuntu subreddit I’ve noticed a relative increase in confidently incorrect answers.
- If it weren't bad for everyone overall, I would support intentionally giving wrong solutions on Reddit. As it is, I simply only go there now for the pre-lemmy knowledge as many do, though as Lemmy starts getting a deeper knowledge base I expect that will slowly change, I find the quality of both the questions and answers on Lemmy to be much greater nine times out of ten.
- Ya, it still has a backlog of great answers to questions from the past, but hopefully as new questions are asked and new issues are brought up, Lemmy can grow that backlog as well.

Programming.dev is a great instance
- Yessir

Heres comes the internet hug of death ;)

One time I was looking up a question related to obsidian MD, only to find out there was a post about my exact issue, I open it, I've already upvoted it. I read closer, it's my own post from 6mo ago.

That's huge! Makes me realize that there's not really a way for anybody to know that a particular result is from Lemmy/the fediverse by looking at it, especially with the weird TLDs people use. I wonder if Google will eventually start recognizing ActivityPub clients differently?

Your first mistake was unironically using google to search for anything in 2023.
- Yeah, all the kids Bing it now!
  
  Nah, the cool kids Quack it.

Maybe try SearXNG?
https://github.com/searxng/searxng
https://searx.space/
Or maybe something like https://perplexity.ai to point towards where to look

Happens to me all the time with my Networking, Fortinet, Ansible, and Cisco subreddits, and that’s exactly why I’m hesitant to purge and delete my account.
That and I haven’t found comparable communities here.

How do I make DDG only returns results from lemmy. Usually you can make it only return results from a specific website (like reddit.com) but you can't do that because of different instances.
- That's a problem I notice with Lemmy. You can point search engines at specific instances but not all instances which makes finding content that's only present on Lemmy very difficult.
  
  Yup. lemmy seems to work okay, but it would miss something like !programming.dev since it doesn't have lemmy in the name.
  If you know where the community is hosted, you can probably do site:instance and get decent results.
  What we really need is a better integrated search inside lemmy. That way I won't feel the need to use a search engine as often. If that works, perhaps someone could make a single site that tracks all popular communities (just post comment, not comments) for better SEO, and then links to the actual posts. Kind of like those StackOverflow copy sites that I keep running into.

That is super neat. Google needs to put a fediverse, lemmy, or mastodon logo beside the result imo

Yay HaxeFlixel
That was one of my main introductions to programming in general

Probably easier to archive as well without all the bs javascript stuff that new reddit is doing.

based

79 comments