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.

  • DankMemeMachine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    622·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • Konala Koala@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      31·
      3 years ago

      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.

  • Quetzacoatl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    3 years ago

    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!

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • whzfux@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        3 years ago

        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

        • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          4·
          3 years ago

          The built in search, well sucks. Search for “Not undermine wanting” and you won’t be able to find your comment. Essentially:

          1. All words are required
          2. The order of each of the search terms is important
          3. The search results here provide no ranking.
          4. The searching here is relatively slow. (now some queries on my site are slow as well, but most should be fast)
          • whzfux@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            3 years ago

            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.

    • marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      3 years ago

      “some search string instance:lemmy.world”.

      Keywords are:

      instance:<instance name>

      community:!<community name>@<instance name>

      and

      author:@<author name>@<instance name>.

  • lionkoy5555@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 years ago

    hmm the site is not loading for me, i’m from the Philippines if that matters. It just keeps on loading. Will try again