Why YSK: Searching topcs on reddit was simple matter of entering desired term and prepending or appending keyword reddit. With lemmy’s decentralised structure finding particular topic without knowing to which, or rather if even there is community dealing with such topic(s) can be a headache inducing hurdle. So appending simple:

site: lemmy.*

site:lemmy.*

to Your google search feature can ease up search.

P.S.

to avoid certain domains You can use e.g.:

-site: beehaw.org

-site:beehaw.org

@edit: removed spaces thank You @inquisitor1965@kbin.social

  • readbeanicecream@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Duckduckgo has a bang for Mastodon: !msocial. Maybe we should start putting in requests for Fediverse bangs: !lemmy, !kbin, !beehaw, etc.

    It would be better if they would add !fediverse that searches all of the sites. Maybe one day!

    • FlowerTree@pawb.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      If you use firefox, you can use extensions to add any lemmy instances as a search engine options. Then, simply add an @ shortcut to the lemmy search engine options, and you’ll have the ddg equivalent of bangs in your firefox search bar.

      Firefox does allow you to change search engine straight from the search bar by typing @ shortcut. An example of this by default, typing @ddg on firefox makes you search with duckduckgo instead of your default search engine.

      Keep in mind that you have to type the shortcut on the searchbar first, before typing anything else.

    • Unblended@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Very cool, I didn’t know they added !msocial.

      Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.

      I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.

      On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots…?

      • readbeanicecream@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        looks like it. !msocial {{{string}} points to https://mastodon.social/tags/string. So, !msocial Cats searches https://mastodon.social/tags/Cats.

  • Briskfall@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve had better results searching through the instances themselves because Google doesn’t always index the keywords on time. On caveat of this method is that if the instance doesn’t have the syncing out the instance where the info is from being propagated, then this trick would not work

  • Jessica@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    YSK: This doesn’t work in DuckDuckGo because I just independently had the idea to try this a few days ago and returned no results. I didn’t think to try on Google. I believe DuckDuckGo is running on Microsoft Bing so it likely doesn’t work there either

  • RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninjaEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    So this is a good idea in principle, but there are a lot of sites that don’t follow the “lemmy.tld” format. I checked the list of instances connected to our site, lemmy.ninja. We’ve been up for a few days, so we’ve accumulated a lot of instances by now. Following the Lemmy.* format gave me 285 out of 585 of our current instances. So just under 50%.

    • Spacecraft@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      @Kichae@kbin.social pointed out here why it may not really matter too much. As long as everything is pretty well cross pollinated, things should be discoverable. I imagine the bigger the user base the better it will be.