One thing Reddit dominates on is search results. I’m looking things up and seeing so many links to reddit, which I guess is going to help keep that place relevant (unless those subreddits stay dark).
I wondered how Lemmy and this fed thingy stuff all works for that? With more posts can we expect to see people arriving through search results?
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There’s a lot of things that factor into the answer, but I think overall it’s gonna be pretty random. Some instances are on domains without “Lemmy” in the name, some don’t include “Lemmy” in the site name configuration, and in the case of some like my own instance, I set the
X-Robots-Tagresponse header such that search engines that properly honor the header won’t crawl or index content on my instance. I’ve actually taken things a step further with mine and put all public paths except for the API endpoints behind authentication (so that Lemmy clients and federation still work with it), so you can’t browse my instance content without going through a proper client for extra privacy. But that goes off-topic.Reddit was centralized so could be optimized for SEO. Lemmy instances are individually run with different configuration at the infrastructure level and the application configuration level, which if most people leave things fairly vanilla, should result in pretty good discovery of Lemmy content across most of these kinds of instances, but I would think most people technical enough to host their own instances would have deviated from defaults and (hopefully) implemented some hardening, which would likely mess with SEO.
So yeah, expect it to be pretty random, but not necessarily unworkable.
Easily the best answer here, I think the people who think it will work “just like Reddit” are unfamiliar with federation still, and aren’t used to thinking things through in those terms.
Not to mention that Google results in general have been pretty trash for a couple years now. I don’t expect fediverse content to be prominent for some time unless there is a dedicated service that indexes everything.
I kind of feel like Kagi will be all over this with it’s forum ‘lens’ for search, but it’s paid. Maybe boardreader would focus on this too?
Google search isn’t as good as it used to be and using startpage.com to break the filter bubble isn’t effective as much anymore either. So we probably all also need to start remembering like 1999 and different search engine for different things and looking for what works the best.
I mean why couldn’t there be a dedicated service that indexes everything? Whoever makes it and gets it working in a user friendly manner is going to have a significant level of control on the content that is shown in the results. If you don’t want it, it isn’t indexed. I don’t have to stretch the imagination to think of parties that have good reason to want to be first to do that across Activity Pub as a whole. Mastodon is already a big frontrunner in that regard.
One thing to keep in mind is that Google currently penalizes links that don’t end in the common top domains like “.com”, “.org” and similar. So something like lemmy.world, if indexed, will rank lower than a site ending in .com with the same keyword density.
Let Google be irrelevant. It kind of already is there in the absence of Reddit.
The nerds always blaze a trail when boring old entrenched media ruins good things. In this case the thing being ruined is a search engine that makes the critical mistake of assuming a traditionally “prestigious” .com equates value. Fuck the old establishment, it’s time to ditch decrepit big tech and remake the internet the way it was meant to be. It’s time to reinvent how we share and discover content.
Google went from being the most important website on the internet to being more and more useless, it’s amazing seeing such a massive company go downhill. But they have so much money that they’ll be able to stay big forever from capital alone.
What do you use as a search engine instead of Google? I feel like I’ve tried everything, but always end up back at Google search.
SearXNG
Startpage, SwissCows, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, SearX
Been using Ecosia and so far its been very good. I did not have a need to use Google once.
I usually don’t see lemmy on search engines, sadly.
You can add lemmy and lemmy world will show up.
I’m curious about this too, but I don’t think this can compete
Unfortunately Lemmy isn’t great for SEO because lemmy-ui heavily relies on JavaScript to render the page, which search bots avoid.
I actually added a custom search engine to Firefox… so I can search something on Lemmy. I have the keyword ‘LW’ for Lemmy.World search right now (because Lemmy.ml was offline a while).
Basically, do the Lemmy search (search term
ssss) then edit/replacessss>%sand copy the entire link.https://lemmy.world/search/q/%s/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1Then using ‘add custom search engine’ extension on Firefox, you add it.
Would be cool to have a browser extension that can return searched terms from fediverse sources that you choose.
A lot of search engines rely on backlinks to rank the reliablitly/validity of a site so even if a given instance was picked up to have enough places reference it to be seen as a valid source would ve a pretty heavy lift.
I would expect Lemmy to show up equally in the search results if there is enough relevant content. My tiny tiny instance is already showing up in search results, crawlers can definitely find stuff on here. It would be great if at some point we can append “lemmy” to search queries to get the good stuff like we could with Reddit.
