1y ago

Search Lemmy 0.4.0 update (an enhanced search engine for Lemmy)

www.search-lemmy.com

A couple days ago I updated https://search-lemmy.com/ to 0.4.0.

New features, that several people were asking for:

The UI has been overhauled and it should be much easier to find your home instance now.
Search itself has been overhauled. Increase search performance significantly. I also automatically search for related terms as well. You may now see fewer search results, but ideally they should be more relevant. You can also now include basic syntax like:
- quotes: "some terms that must be together"
- negative terms: cat -dog (shows posts about cats that don't mention dogs)
- either or: cat OR dog (shows posts about either cats or dogs). The default search behavior is now an implicit AND, but order doesn't matter.
I've added several new filters that you can use including:
- !safeoff -- Disables safe search allowing NSFW posts to appear in the search results (NSFW is now hidden by default)
- since:YYYY-MM-DD -- shows only posts that have occurred since the specified date
- until:YYYY-MM-DD -- same as above but in reverse. It will only posts up to the given date.
I've removed the preferred-instance query parameter from the results URL so it should be easier to share links to search results now.
The date the post was created or last updated is now displayed in the search results.

Bug Fixes:

Site performance should now be stable. Fixed a bug related to the database pool that was causing the site to hang.
Fixed a bug that would cause broken links.
Fixed various bugs with the crawler causing posts to be missed.

Known Issues:

If you set your home-instance to a fairly small instance, the number of search results is also relatively small. Once (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3259) is resolved. I should be able to show links regardless of what your home instance is set to, allowing you to search the entire Fediverse.
Currently searching only looks at the post title and body. Comments aren't indexed either. This also is dependent on the above issue on Lemmy itself.

Finally some things to note:

I've started to refactor the code to abstract away Lemmy from the actual search engine. As I now start to prepare to search other Fediverse instances like Kbin, and maybe even Mastodon, etc...

34 comments

I've saved this, but it would be nice to see the syntax somewhere in the search engine
- Look under search tips for the filters at least.

What about it I want to find the most populated community for a given search term, across the lemmiverse?
- Currently you can just search for posts. I don't track anything like the number of members in a community etc.. just the content of the post and how more or less accurate they are to your current query. I'm continuously trying to improve the page rankings though.
  I guess in theory you can perform the same search multiple times with different community:!some_community@some_instance filters to see which returns the most results, but ya, that wouldn't be the most convenient. At the moment this tool though is about finding posts, but who knows what features I may add in the future.
  
  Sounds good, figured it couldn’t hurt to ask
- I think you should use Lemmy explorer for this.
  
  Thanks, good calln

Thank you for making this!
I don’t get any results no matter what I search for. The page refreshes, but no results (or errors) appear.
Turning my adblockers off had no effect. Same behaviour in Safari and Firefox on iPadOS 16.5.x.
Edit: Oops, I didn’t select an instance and the default instance (Ice Orchid) returned no results. Changing to my home instance fixed it. Maybe default should get changed to Lemmy.world or something big?
- Thanks. Adding an issue for that. I should be able to set the default instance to the 'seed-instance' that's configured for the crawler.
  
  Cheers!

Great, thank you for your work!

GOAT behaviour, I'll bookmark it!

I created !ultralight@lemmy.world -- searching for "ultralight" returns zero results on your site https://search-lemmy.com/results?query=ultralight&page=1 whereas searching for it at least returns something on each lemmy instance i've searched
- Replying from my lemmy.ml account since lemmy.world appears to be down but:
  some query community:!ultralight@lemmy.world would search your community. Now, if this community is less than 24hrs old, it may not have been indexed yet, so you may just need to wait a day or so.
  I just tested with https://www.search-lemmy.com/results?query=test+community%3A%21ultralight%40lemmy.world&page=1 I was able to at least find 2 posts.
- some query community:!ultralight@lemmy.world would search your community. Now, if this community is less than 24hrs old, it may not have been indexed yet, so you may just need to wait a day or so.
  I just tested with https://www.search-lemmy.com/results?query=test+community%3A%21ultralight%40lemmy.world&page=1 I was able to at least find 2 posts.
  
  very cool, thanks for the feedback and the site! my question is more along the lines of whether someone interested in a topic would be able to find my community without knowing it existed in the first place?

Thank you.

Do these changes automatically carry over to 3rd party apps?
- This doesn't change the behavior of the built-in search within Lemmy. But rather this is suppose to be a close approximation of using Google with adding reddit to the end of your query.
  The problem with the fediverse is that there are so many different instances you can't really include them all in a search query and even if you could the links that Google would provide wouldn't necessarily go to YOUR instance. This aims to fix that.

34 comments