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Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy (www.search-lemmy.com)

submitted 1 year ago by marsara9@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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](/c/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.

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[-] TheBrainGuy@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Cool! Is there a way to search all instances at once?

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year 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.de 2 points 1 year 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.world 4 points 1 year ago

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)

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[-] Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago

Nobody has mentioned it yet, but https://fedi-search.com/ already exists

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year 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.

[-] theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] sauron@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Missed opportunity to name it "Loogle"

[-] xavier666@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Can't wait for all the various lemmy tools to be integrated into lemmy UI

[-] Domille@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

this is awesome and very needed. Thank you.

[-] MrValdez@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

With the new third party apps coming up, maybe they can use your search engine. TAP connectivity!

[-] m3t00@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

hmm, site:lemmy.world cat

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

"some search string instance:lemmy.world".

Keywords are:

instance:<instance name>

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

and

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

[-] Hutchpd@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Can it filter NSFW posts? As on Reddit you can search "pussy nsfw:no" and get pictures of cats.

[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 3 points 1 year ago

Why do I learn about this now that I pretty much don't care?

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Not yet but I can add this feature

[-] burak@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Can you add a nsfw:only filter while you’re at it? :)

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[-] Azzu@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

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 :)

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.)

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[-] puddlexplorer@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If I use this search engine instead of the one on the website, does it mean it would put less strain on the server? Yeah, I'm not quite techy.

If so, I guess this is a big step.

Fine addition to my keyword/bookmarks library.

All I need now is the option to sort by New.

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

If I use this search engine instead of the one on the website, does it mean it would put less strain on the server? Yeah, I’m not quite techy.

Yes. Searches on my site only hit my server and don't touch your home server unless you click on a link.

[-] anders@rytter.me 2 points 1 year ago

@marsara9 would be cool if it had the ability to search through all instances. don't know if thats possible

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Eventually. I'm waiting on a bug in Lemmy itself to be fixed. Mainly once I can post a link to a post here and anyone can click on it without leaving their home instance.

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Oh wanted to add, as a workaround for now you can set your home instance to lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Because of how the fediverse works, searching the larger older instances should have a fairly complete copy of content.

Once I do "fix" this though, note that you may click on a link and get a 404 page. As that post may not be on your home instance.

One rule I will always follow for this project is that if I display a link, that link MUST take you to your home instance and that link MUST point to the post in question (but I cannot guarantee that you won't get an error, just that you won't be taken to a completely different post)

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[-] csolisr@communities.azkware.net 2 points 1 year ago

Wondering if this will see the same backlash that Mastodon had when users were planning to add a search engine - many users moved to Mastodon specifically because their posts are unsearchable by default, and that prevents some dogpiling that was common on Twitter.

[-] tenth@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Great heads up

I just don’t get why people would join SOCIAL media if they don’t want to their posts public. Its like having a group meeting in the middle of a public square and complain people saw them

Maybe they should just use discord or or private communities instead

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[-] machineunlearning@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Beautiful work.

[-] spokendotcpp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you very much for your dedicated & hard work.

[-] daq 2 points 8 months ago

This project dead?

[-] hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Awesome! Thanks!

[-] Mermitian@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Really nice work! I was excited since we talked about it, and it definitely delivers imo!

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Ya, now if everyone can stop finding bugs! So I can take some time off. /jk

[-] Mermitian@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Haha yeah! You might have to resort to an internet-less vacation :p

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[-] nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Can we only search by title with this? I'm getting a lot of unrelated results.

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[-] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Can you tell me how to use search-lemmy to find this post that I created yesterday?

Getting started with net-snmp in C++

When searching for "snmp" I get zero results. When searching for "net-snmp", I get 37 unrelated results, none of which is my post.

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[-] chaorace 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Very nice! Have you considered using the lemmyverse.net data for your sitelist instead of finding instances through crawling? You can download the JSON data from the project release page. I've been using their data in my own code and it's very thorough, albeit rather chunky.

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