Why YSK: Searching topcs on reddit was simple matter of entering desired term and prepending or appending keyword reddit.
With lemmy's decentralised structure finding particular topic without knowing to which, or rather if even there is community dealing with such topic(s) can be a headache inducing hurdle. So appending simple:
I've had better results searching through the instances themselves because Google doesn't always index the keywords on time. On caveat of this method is that if the instance doesn't have the syncing out the instance where the info is from being propagated, then this trick would not work
So this is a good idea in principle, but there are a lot of sites that don't follow the "lemmy.tld" format. I checked the list of instances connected to our site, lemmy.ninja. We've been up for a few days, so we've accumulated a lot of instances by now. Following the Lemmy.* format gave me 285 out of 585 of our current instances. So just under 50%.
@Kichae@kbin.social pointed out here why it may not really matter too much. As long as everything is pretty well cross pollinated, things should be discoverable. I imagine the bigger the user base the better it will be.
YSK: This doesn’t work in DuckDuckGo because I just independently had the idea to try this a few days ago and returned no results. I didn’t think to try on Google. I believe DuckDuckGo is running on Microsoft Bing so it likely doesn’t work there either