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.comin 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.wroldorinstance: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.world. - Author – Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as:
author:.world.
- Instance – This will filter the results to only show communities that belong to a particular instance. Just type something like
- 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.
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 :)
Are the search result links not opening on your home instance? If so please raise an issue on GitHub with your home instance URL and I’ll investigate. But you should be able to select your home instance from the drop-down and then search and all of the results will have their links direct to that instance. (This does require that your instance has been indexed by the search engine, which as of this moment I’ve only indexed 278 of the nearly 1000? Lemmy instances out there.)
I think you misunderstood. You were annoyed by links not going to your home instance when searching so you made this website. I was annoyed by all links everywhere not going to my home instance so I wrote the script. They’re both tools that help achieve the same thing so I felt right to post mine here, too :)
Sounds good, and thanks for the hard work!
No, thank you! :)
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.
Missed opportunity to name it “Loogle”
Holy shit. This is the best thing.
Cool! Is there a way to search all instances at once?
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.
Not wanting to undermine your excellent work, what would be the specific advantage yet, compared to searching for communities / posts via the lemmy page?
I am completly New to lemmy or reddit and still searching for a nice and easy way to find relevant threads for me
The built in search, well sucks. Search for “Not undermine wanting” and you won’t be able to find your comment. Essentially:
- All words are required
- The order of each of the search terms is important
- The search results here provide no ranking.
- The searching here is relatively slow. (now some queries on my site are slow as well, but most should be fast)
Ahhh i think i got it - so it is not a search for communities but for full text
It then makes sense to me why i need toselecft an instance beforehand.
Can it filter NSFW posts? As on Reddit you can search “pussy nsfw:no” and get pictures of cats.
Why do I learn about this now that I pretty much don’t care?
Not yet but I can add this feature
Can you add a nsfw:only filter while you’re at it? :)
And make it default ;-)
It’s nsfw:yes on Reddit 😂
Thank you very much for you dedicated & hard work.
Nobody has mentioned it yet, but https://fedi-search.com/ already exists
Yes but that search doesn’t take you to the instance that you are logged into already. Which is one of my main goals with this site. While that did give me the inspiration for this and has the power of Google behind it, it lacks knowledge about how the fediverse actually works.
this is awesome and very needed. Thank you.
hmm, site:lemmy.world cat
“some search string instance:lemmy.world”.
Keywords are:
instance:<instance name>community:!<community name>@<instance name>and
author:@<author name>@<instance name>.
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!
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.
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.
Looks like your comment got triple posted. The lemmy instances are getting slammed lol
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.
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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.
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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.
Hoping there will be a way to integrate it with kbin soon!
I can’t give a timeframe on Kbin yet, as I want to get it as stable as possible with Lemmy. fist. But I think Kbin will probably be next on my radar as the overall structure of the two platforms is very similar.
With the new third party apps coming up, maybe they can use your search engine. TAP connectivity!
Update: I’m hoping I got the stability issues fixed. I’ll know more in the next 24hrs though.
