Fediverse @lemmy.world marsara9 @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy

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.

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153 comments

this is awesome and very needed. Thank you.
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.
Missed opportunity to name it "Loogle"
Nobody has mentioned it yet, but https://fedi-search.com/ already exists
Can it filter NSFW posts? As on Reddit you can search "pussy nsfw:no" and get pictures of cats.
Wondering if this will see the same backlash that Mastodon had when users were planning to add a search engine - many users moved to Mastodon specifically because their posts are unsearchable by default, and that prevents some dogpiling that was common on Twitter.
Holy fuck I've been thinking about how annoying it is that I can't search lemmy for a few days now - and here you are suddenly just handing the tool I want to me with features that I didn't even think about. THANK YOU SO MUCH. Adding this post to my saved.
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!
This is great! I was so annoyed by the links not going to my home instance that I made this userscript (Lemmy post)! It rewrites all links on all websites to always point to your home instance.

Could be a nice addition for everyone that likes this website :)
Can you tell me how to use search-lemmy to find this post that I created yesterday?

Getting started with net-snmp in C++

When searching for "snmp" I get zero results. When searching for "net-snmp", I get 37 unrelated results, none of which is my post.
Cool! Is there a way to search all instances at once?
Beautiful work.
Really nice work! I was excited since we talked about it, and it definitely delivers imo!
Thank you very much for you dedicated & hard work.
Hugged to death.
Blocked by cloudflare ID 7e0ba74959214ac0 Client Thunder (Android) Instance lemmy.world
It says I am blocked from using it. Any reason?
Not very knowledgeable on programming, but isn't there a way to implement this code with the Lemmy/fediverse devs to integrate this to the site and afterwards to the different apps used to browse it?

Great contribution regardless, thanks for your work!
P.S. to those trying to use a filter, I have a bug that's been discovered: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/13

Long story short, make sure to put your query first and the filter at the end (with no space between the simicolon)
Doesn't seem to work with for me (on jerboa). Says site does not exist when I click on a link.
hmm the site is not loading for me, i'm from the Philippines if that matters. It just keeps on loading. Will try again
hmm, site:lemmy.world cat
Hoping there will be a way to integrate it with kbin soon!
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.
Great work! Will have to try this out tomorrow.
Can't wait for all the various lemmy tools to be integrated into lemmy UI
Update: I'm hoping I got the stability issues fixed. I'll know more in the next 24hrs though.
Hey, just a heads up, your server seems to be down at the moment.
Awesome!
It should be back online now. Looks like Nginx crashed?
fantastic work lemmy team. with this pace I feel like lemmy will do it and lemme tell you, reddit will suffer a big loss!!
Thank you so much for creating this.
With the new third party apps coming up, maybe they can use your search engine. TAP connectivity!
If I use this search engine instead of the one on the website, does it mean it would put less strain on the server? Yeah, I'm not quite techy.

If so, I guess this a big is step.

Fine addition to my keyword/bookmarks library.

All I need now is the option to sort by New.
Based
Blocked by cloudflare ID 7e0ba74959214ac0
This is great thanks for this!
Amazing, thank you!
Cool, thanks ☺️
It amazes me how talented people are. Imagine whats going to happen if all the talented people start workinng on Lemmy
Thank you! You are my hero. I was really wondering what I was going to do to replace my "site:reddit.com" search habits in Google and here you come with this wonderful tool.
Yeah! Going to replace my googling for something like "<search> reddit"
Cooooooool 😎
@marsara9 would be cool if it had the ability to search through all instances. don't know if thats possible
This project dead?
Oh thank you, this is great!
Awesome work! Thank you!
This is amazing, nice work! My only criticism at the moment is that on the search results page, the input becomes so squashed that it becomes pointless to use and I’ve gone back to the main screen to redo searches. Giving it its own row, and the search button and drop down their own. should fix that easily.
Noice!
Absolutely fantastic- Thank you!!
class
Awesome! Thanks!
Thank you! You are my hero. I was really wondering what I was going to do to replace my "site:reddit.com" search habits in Google and here you come with this wonderful tool.
I would really like to see this get integrated into SearXNG
is this a crawler or does it index via mass federation? Or is it using API calls?
Thank you! You are my hero. I was really wondering what I was going to do to replace my "site:reddit.com" search habits in Google and here you come with this wonderful tool.
Can it be made to search in the comments? Right now, I'm finding more results when I use the search function inside lemmy.world than if I use this
Why the choice for a .com domain? Is this a commercial project?
The results are different depending on which preferred instance I select. Is that the correct behavior?
This looks good, I just found an old (3 year old post - I didn't even know Lemmy was around back then!) and commented on it. There were also funnily two other recent comments (one from 2 months ago and another 3 months old).
I see an error saying I've been blocked - i never had that problem with fedisearch!
oh wow this is great. wish it were easy to use this search from a lemmy instance and browse the results from within.
Permanently Deleted
Can we only search by title with this? I'm getting a lot of unrelated results.
Nice! It doesn't work.
Why the choice for a .com domain? Is this a commercial project?
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.
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.

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