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:[email protected]. - Author – Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as:
author:@[email protected].
- 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.
Missed opportunity to name it “Loogle”
Holy shit. This is the best thing.
Doesn’t seem to work with for me (on jerboa). Says site does not exist when I click on a link.
Can’t wait for all the various lemmy tools to be integrated into lemmy UI
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.
Lemmy is not private in any way. In fact, while the OP’s project is really cool and admirable, there is already https://fedi-search.com, which searches top Lemmy instances (and kbin, Mastodon, and peertube) using regular operators behind the scenes in Google, Bing or DDG (whichever you prefer), because those search engines already crawl Lemmy along with the rest of the internet, unless the site owners block crawling via robots.txt.
Now we need a ddg !bang for it!
TBH they can block them from search in the preferences. Otherwise anything on the Web is searchable and findable.
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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
I’ve already got some complaints about that. You can see one of the issues raised on GitHub.
At the moment, I’m only picking up mastodon posts that are federated to Lemmy, but you can’t choose Mastodon as a preferred-instance, yet. When and/if I decide to add Mastodon support, I’ll reach out to the admins over there to get feedback first.
Edit and note to any server admin: If you want to block the crawler from hitting your site, just add
lemmy-searchto your robots.txt and crawling will be prevented. But this doesn’t stop cross-federation posts from being picked up on another instance.Is it “lemmy-search” or “lemmy-server”? The post and this comment seem conflicting (if I didn’t miss something)
Thanks for that, fixing. But it should be
lemmy-search.
Thats very considerate of you
Please don’t take those complaints as negative feedback. I don’t think Lemmy is designed to be private and your search engine would be a great of help to the whole community.
By the way, do you plan to create a community to discuss about your search engine? Maybe users can help you with testing or report issues or improvement
I’ve got a discord page up and going that is invite only right now. No offense to anyone here but i didn’t want to be overwhelmed with users joining in on the discord chat just yet. If you want to help contribute or even just test you can easily find me on discord, and I’ll give you an invite.
Starting a Search-Lemmy community here might be good for visibility too.
If anyone wants to start one up… by all means. I’m not really one to moderate an entire community. At least not yet.
Yeah I hear you. I’ve thought several times about starting niche communities that aren’t here yet but I just am not capable or even able to be a moderator.
By the time they gain traction you can hand them off.
I think the use case and the default expectations about search are pretty different on Lemmy, but I can definitely see this being a potential point of friction, particularly since most content is actually structured by community rather than instance, and in many cases it would make more sense to exclude stuff based on the community it’s posted to or the individual user than by instance. (But I’m sure that wouldn’t be immediately technically feasible.)
Ya Lemmy organizes everything under a community technically. I mean I can filter on any piece of data I can get my hands on, but what makes the most sense. For MVP I chose to just grab whatever the API would give me. But then the question comes, if I do start filtering results, how do I determine what to actually exclude… long story short – not an easy problem at least initially.
I think it makes sense for a “redditlike” to be searchable, while also understanding that Mastodon is a different beast and can benefit from lack of search.
Don’t know if Mastodon posts on Lemmy instances have a specific characteristic, but perhaps you can consider filtering them out while keeping “regular” Lemmy posts and comments?
Blocked by cloudflare ID 7e0ba74959214ac0
Blocked by cloudflare ID 7e0ba74959214ac0 Client Thunder (Android) Instance lemmy.world
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! :)
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.
It might not have been crawled yet. The search engine will periodically search for new content but this isn’t instant. So it may take a day or two to find it.
still not working - is this possibly because of the server being overloaded & the crawl not working? relevant query
PS: is it too much load on your search engine to search across all instances by default? Atm it auto-selects the first in the dropdown list as the preferred instance.
Search engines take time to crawl websites to find content. Right now I’m using
lemmy.mlas my source of truth. So:- The post in question must have been federated to Lemmy.ml
- The crawler then has to discover that post. Right now it’s only scheduled to run on demand, as it’s still doing it’s initial crawl. So it won’t get around to checking Lemmy.ml for new posts for a few days. Eventually it runs once every 6 hours, once it’s caught up.
- Lastly, it has to cross-reference that post on your preferred instance. This is what the crawler is doing right now. It’s taking every post it found on lemmy.ml and trying to find the same post on every other instance.
P.s. the last step is only required because there’s no way to hotlink to a post today as the URL uses an internal identifier. There’s an open GitHub issue on this for Lemmy itself. When/if that is resolved I might be able to speedup the discovery of new content by skipping the cross-referencing step altogether.
thank you for the insights! That sounds mighty resource-intensive for the crawler…
P.s. As for the auto-select thats a known bug and I hope to have it fixed soon.
Hello, I commented about a bug in the instance selector on a cross post, not realizing that wasn’t the actual developer. Not sure if it’s related to what you’re talking about here, but I wanted to bring it to your attention. Great project by the way!
Replied to your comment there. I’ll definitely look into that bug tonight. But I’m still exploring ideas to make instance selection easier …
Not very knowledgeable on programming, but isn’t there a way to implement this code with the Lemmy/fediverse devs to integrate this to the site and afterwards to the different apps used to browse it?
Great contribution regardless, thanks for your work!
See one of my other replies. But that was a thought originally. Just hook into the original database instead of crawling using the APIs. Problem is, the table structure required to search is much different than that of a community form. At least if you want to do searches quickly. It takes me almost 5-10 seconds just to process 50 posts at the moment, and I’m doing those in batches… but ya maybe in the future I can talk to the Lemmy devs and see about merging these two projects?
I really really hope, one of the things I’m loving about the idea of Lemmy or the fediverse is the cooperation aspect, at least in jerboa which is the browser that I am using for now, there is a sense that anyone is pitching in either ideas or actually implementing them, and I guess Lemmy devs are of the same mentality. Anyhow, let’s hope you can merge them and optimize in the future, it would be huge, congrats and good job again.
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Really nice work! I was excited since we talked about it, and it definitely delivers imo!
Ya, now if everyone can stop finding bugs! So I can take some time off. /jk
take time off whenever you need :D Im sure people would rather you go far than go fast
Haha yeah! You might have to resort to an internet-less vacation :p
Based
Update: I’m hoping I got the stability issues fixed. I’ll know more in the next 24hrs though.
P.S. to those trying to use a filter, I have a bug that’s been discovered: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/13
Long story short, make sure to put your query first and the filter at the end (with no space between the simicolon)
Still not working for me, my test query (following the example’s format) is:
Genshin instance:https://lemmit.online/
Nevermind, found the issue already. I should have a fix uploaded tomorrow. Looks like all instance lookups are failing.
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Ya I’m looking into this one already. I’ve got a bug report for it. Might take a day or two to figure out what’s going on.
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It should be back online now. Looks like Nginx crashed?
