1y ago

Will Lemmy posts be searchable on Google?

A great use for reddit is the ability to search posts and opinions about any niche topic. Will that be possible with Lemmy as it grows? Will I be able to Google "instant rice Lemmy" and get a comprehensive tier list of each brand?

I imagine search engines will have trouble with all the different instances(?). EDIT: Especially with instances that don't have Lemmy in their name, I don't think search engines would return them for Lemmy searches?

63 comments

So I've been working on a solution for this.
As I see it Google and others are going to have a hard if not impossible time to incorporate the fediverse, and the fact that the same content can exist on multiple servers.
So I'm working on a search engine specifically build, for Lemmy at least. Where it'll take you to whatever your preferred instance is when tapping on a search result.
I hope to have a MVP up and running in a few more days.
- Can’t emphasize enough how important this is for the growth of Lemmy. Many people I know only access Reddit through google searches.
  
  Yep and I'm one of them. Go look me up on Reddit and I think I have maybe 20 posts over the 14+ years I was on the site. ...joined Lemmy and immediately got frustrated that I couldn't find anything. So I figured I take a crack at it. Especially since I couldn't see how Google would ever be able to link me to my instance. Let alone make it easy to search the entire fediverse without having to write out every possible site, with new ones popping up every day.
  
  Easier to find a Reddit post through Google than by Reddit search.
- Please pop a reminder here. Commenting for a bump.
  
  Search their name on GitHub and you'll find it. Star it to follow.
  
  reminder: https://lemmy.world/post/963301
  
  Can the reminder bots be migrated too?
- Interesting. I hadn't even thought about how the fact that instance1.[post] and instance2.[post@instance1] is essentially the same thing and how search engines would handle it. Interested in what you come up with!
  
  Thanks. If you do some digging you can find the project on GitHub but note that it's a work in progress still. The UI is lacking and it's rough around the edges but it's "working". And I still need to do some optimizations on the crawler itself, etc....
  It's also going to be completely self-hostable just like Lemmy, etc...
- If this guy changes the internet include me in the screenshot.
  
  I’ll invest in seed funding stage. 😂
- IDK, isn't it the same for reddit? It also encourages crossposting, so the same content is on there several times. Maybe I don't understand the fediverse well enough yet, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
- I can see this being helpful
  (commenting so I can bookmark)
- That sounds awesome. Can't wait to see it.
- Shit dude, that'd be a sweet little tool.

I am surprised noone mentioned https://fedi-search.com . It's working pretty well. Full credit to Benjamin Pryor for this
- Tried it, pretty cool, though seems still depend on search engines' indexing. The instance that I'm on seems not indexed.
  Also it's interesting it uses intext to identify whether the results are from fediverse.

You can use a search query to include only results with Lemmy's footer, which is consistent across all Lemmy instances. I made a post about it here: https://lemmy.world/post/342365

Digg.com was the big thing with Reddit trailing. Digg began tweaking the experience toward a more profitable model. I had already come to Reddit when they went too far and there was a sudden enormous migration from Digg to Reddit. Digg went from being THE social media aggregator to being nothing in a matter of weeks.
Reddit is more deeply rooted, so I think it will stick around, I'm cool if Reddit keeps those who are happy with corporate model busy so we can do our thing here.
- It's certainly not going anywhere unless they end up selling it to someone who shuts it down and uses the posts and links as SEO boosting.
  
  Well, Digg.com still exists. It's just that no one cares.
  
  Most likely if it's being sold for anything it's for language model testing.

I think it is preferable to ask other search engines like DuckDuckGo to index Lemmy info. Google is full of garbage.
- Brave Search would be better, they have a dedicated section on the results page for discussions.
  
  Brave is an advertising company and should not be preferred.

Depends on Google. These tech companies don't like new platforms, especially those competing with established ones like Reddit. You'll see that Google often discriminates against Lemmy or Mastodon.

It’s up to the individual instance owner and Lemmy the software itself enabling SEO. It’s just getting started now so it will be long time before that.
- likely not THAT long. I'm sure things are already being crawled

Maybe, but probable Google try to kill us

In the future they eventually might be, for some instances. Though definitely not for all of them, since some of the instances might disable indexing.
I've actually already seen a few Lemmy results (lemmy.ml) in Google searches, the trouble is it doesn't link to individual posts, just the community so it's not particularly useful. So it definitely is possible, just needs to be improved to be able to index posts.

Respectfully: Fuck that.
If you want to find the best instant rice recommendations on Lemmy, Lemmy should have a functional post search function, rather than me relying on a malevolent corporate entity like google to index all the content.
Search has gone to shit as the Internet has embraced social media sites, an upside of this is that wikipedia+Lemmy+key word search, mayas accurate as asking Google Bard or bing, and they can be built on entirety open tech.
- I came here to say something similar but you put it nicely.
- Cool rage but you dismissing search indexing is kinda hilarious. It's not going away and it's what makes the web. Would you rather have 3 big websites instead of indexed web?
  
  Would you rather have 3 big websites instead of indexed web?
  That's what we already have, I'd you need to find stuff by doing site specific googles, both google & that site have failed.
  The web is dead, it's been dead for a while, now is the time to build something new in it's wake that rather than depending on closed source algorithms, indexing 3 big websites, we could just search the 3 big websites directly.

Correct me if I’m wrong but if individual admins allow their instances to be indexed wouldn’t the instance itself have some sort of metadata identifying it as a Lemmy branch?

Basically use <query> site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:beehaw.org OR site:kbin.social (or whatever main instances you want to hit)
You can also use this for custom browser search keys like the following https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+site%3Alemmy.world+OR+site%3Alemmyml+OR+site%3Abeehaw.org+OR+site%3Akbin.social
- I imagine that would be quite inconvenient... Especially as Lemmy grows and has potentially many more instances.
  
  I believe that DDG has a shorthand for site:Reddit (without the .com). If lemmy gets popular enough DDG may implement a similar shorthand that incorporates the fediverse without us having to use a massive string. Like if it gets big enough, we may not have to solve this problem because others will see the value in making it easy.
  That’s my hope at least.

Reddit did not start out as the thing to google, it's 15+ years old, only in the last 5y I started prefixing my google searches with reddit.
- I actually found Reddit by googling things. I had seen it 5 or 6 times over a few years, and eventually I just went to the main site. I might have even used Reddit in the search before I joined. Regardless, I had recognized that all the best answers for tricky problems that I had were coming from Reddit before I even joined 11 years ago.
- Everyone's experience on this will be different, but I personally started using reddit about 12 years or so ago largely because at that point a lot of my Google searches were already pointing me towards reddit. I wasn't necessarily going to google specifically to find reddit results, but since that's where I kept ending up i figured I might as well go straight to reddit. And since reddit's search function is and has always been trash, i pretty much immediately started using Google to search reddit.

I would argue that eventually, yes, one will be able to google search Lemmy just like Reddit.
- Only if we make sure the tech giants don't kill this platform
  
  How would they? It's all decentralized
- I wish there was a way to get an entire Reddit archive over here. Realistically I'm still going to have to search Reddit because it has 10+ years of answers to obscure questions.

If Lemmy becomes a source of enough information like Reddit is, search engines will index it. SEO is a marketing thing, and a place like Lemmy doesn't really need that. Google, DDG, etc. all put engineering effort into making sure sites with lots of information are indexed and available in their search results.

Lemmy is not as unique as Reddit as a word. I get a lot of Lemmy Kilmister matches. But still hopeful
- Use the exclusion keyword for your search provider. For example on google lemmy -kilmister -motorhead will get you only Lemmy software results by excluding pages with "kilmister" or "motorhead" in their contents.

@QuinicV Why would it not be possible? It depends on the software, if all text is open to be indexed. Kbin and Lemmy instances are basically open forum software and are indexed by search engines. You can test it in Google or other engines by forcing to search on the site only with site:lemmy.world are posts indexed? , which would be an empty search result if they were locked down like discord content.
- But what if the post I'm searching for is not on lemmy.world? Say the instance doesn't even have Lemmy in their name, like beehaw.org. How would a search engine index it? How would it know it's part of Lemmy?
  
  There will be links to everything somewhere. The same way you knew to get the cave in the same way you know to get to Lemmy. There are already links that have been posted to Reddit that are in archives that are easily followable. Google doesn't just search one or two things they search all the links to the things and then the links from those things to other things. If Google can't figure out how to get to it chances are you don't know it's there either.

Ok, not a stupid question - but annoying to assume that only Google is relevant.
Also, annoying that you'll assume that searching 'instant rice' will pull results from Lemmy. Even searching Lemmy for 'instant rice' brings zero results.
Instant rice simply had all of the good parts milled out If you really are interested, I'd skip it entirely - 'instant' rice is basically rice that got everything milled out of it, then it's cooked, then dried - it costs a lot more and tastes like shit.
So I hope my answer will come up in your next search...
However, searching for 'sending epub files to my kindle' brings up quite a few... and down the list there, we see posts from 2022 in r/kindle, and entering reddit as an extra keyword pulls up more...
So really, we want to know if we search for something which should have results in Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world - and not only Lemmy, there are others - like BeeHaw) how long is it going to take before this gets picked up by SEARCH ENGINES (Let's not say Google, or Reddit - these are bad habits unless there's a specific need to specify).> instant rice
- Your haughty ass is even more annoying tbh.
- but annoying to assume that only Google is relevant.
  Google's market share is around 92%. Of course it's the most relevant thing. Other search engines only exist for 10% of the users.
  
  You know that Google and Reddit own the internet - so just go there, and make sure you're using a Chromium based browser because that's the market share too.
  That way, you can work to create a Fediverse whilst Google and friends succeed in closing all the loops to take total control of your internet and browser.
  Other people will say they 'search'.
  Part of the marketing strategy is to make Microsoft, Google, Reddit etc the default.
  Why reinforce it?
  The issue is becoming accessible to Search.
  Not specifically to become accessible to Google.
  Here's one example of something I found OUTSIDE the fediverse via search.
  I use SearXNG, but I remember that one came via Qwant search and NOT via Google.
  Language IS very important here, and it's important to avoid always using 'default' branded options which are not and should never be considered the default.

You just need to backlink to Lemmy from an already known websites and the crawlers will find their way.
See: https://backlinko.com/link-building-strategies
About the search engine to dispaly the correct instance, that is something I don't think that works now and would require optimizations.

63 comments

The issue is becoming accessible to Search.