[META] [Crosspost] Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/963301

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.

Rules

The rules for behavior are a straight carry over of Mastodon.World’s rules. You can click the link but we’ve reposted them here in brief, as a guideline. We will continue to use the Mastodon.World rules as the master list. Over all, be nice to each other and remember this isn’t a community built around debate. For the rules about formatting your posts, scroll down to number 2.

1. Follow the rules of Mastodon.world, which can be found here.

A. Provide an inclusive and supportive environment. This means if it isn’t rulebreaking and we can’t be supportive to them then we probably shouldn’t engage.

B. No illegal content.

C. Use content warnings where appropriate. This means mark your submissions NSFW if need be.

D. No uncivil behavior. This includes, but is not limited to: Name Calling; Bullying; Trolling; Disruptive Commenting; or Personal Criticisms.

E. No Harrassment. As an example in relation to Transgender people this includes, deadnaming, misgendering, and promotion of conversion therapy. Similarly Misogyny, Misandry, and Racism are also banned here.

2. Include a community title and description in your post title. - A following example of this would be New Communities - A place to post new communities all over Lemmy for discovery and promotion.

3. Follow the formatting. - The formatting as included below is important for people getting universal links across Lemmy as easily as possible.

FAQ:

Q: Why do I get a 404?

A: At least one user in an instance needs to search for a community before it gets fetched. Searching for the community will bring it into the instance and it will fetch a few of the most recent posts without comments. If a user is subscribed to a community, then all of the future posts and interactions are now in-sync.

Q: When I try to create a post, the circle just spins forever. Why is that?

A: This is a current known issue with large communities. Sometimes it does get posted, but just continues spinning, but sometimes it doesn’t get posted and continues spinning. If it doesn’t actually get posted, the best thing to do is try later. However, only some people seem to be having this problem at the moment.

Image Attribution:

𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub English

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1 year ago

I agree with this suggestion. Without the URL, I’m kind of lost as to which instance I’m actually searching.

Maybe a “search all” feature to seach all instances simultaneously? Although, I’m pretty sure that’s near impossible with how the fediverse works. Still would be cool.