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:[email protected].
Author – Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as: author:@[email protected].
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.
make those results sort- and exportable (CSV, JSON, XML or the like), and you could be the new redditsearch.io. especially filtering results by different community/time/author would be great, and sorting by length/upvotes. what was that site with reddit post statistics called again? I know, this all might be further out, and wrangling bugs, the changing API and cloudflare might be more pressing issues, but maybe put it on the feature request list somewhere? all the best, and thank you for making this!
There is a public API now. While I won’t support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.
When you search for posts you’re just matching against the title or body. For communities it’s searching the posts within that community.
There’s also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.
So I’m not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I’d share.
Having to send out all those posts, comments, likes is killing the servers holding all the content. The project leaders really need to make an announcement about the performance problems, they are systemic.
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.
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.
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)
@marsara9
I see. Will just set home to the same as the one I search. I’m using Friendica so I’m used to copy links to the search field in order to fetch remote Lemmy posts.
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.
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-search to your robots.txt and crawling will be prevented. But this doesn’t stop cross-federation posts from being picked up on another instance.
It searches the title and body. It also automatically searches for similar words like. Like ‘bike’, ‘biking’, ‘bikes’ (aka stemming). Granted though, I’m still improving the page ranking as time goes on.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Can it filter NSFW posts? As on Reddit you can search “pussy nsfw:no” and get pictures of cats.
Not yet but I can add this feature
Can you add a nsfw:only filter while you’re at it? :)
And make it default ;-)
make those results sort- and exportable (CSV, JSON, XML or the like), and you could be the new redditsearch.io. especially filtering results by different community/time/author would be great, and sorting by length/upvotes. what was that site with reddit post statistics called again? I know, this all might be further out, and wrangling bugs, the changing API and cloudflare might be more pressing issues, but maybe put it on the feature request list somewhere? all the best, and thank you for making this!
There is a public API now. While I won’t support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.
When you search for posts you’re just matching against the title or body. For communities it’s searching the posts within that community.
There’s also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.
So I’m not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I’d share.
Can it be made to search in the comments? Right now, I’m finding more results when I use the search function inside lemmy.world than if I use this
That’s on my todo list. For the initial release I wanted to get posts working primarily.
See: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/blob/master/server/src/crawler/crawler.rs#L178
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Having to send out all those posts, comments, likes is killing the servers holding all the content. The project leaders really need to make an announcement about the performance problems, they are systemic.
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deleted by creator
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
Nobody has mentioned it yet, but https://fedi-search.com/ already exists
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.
@marsara9 would be cool if it had the ability to search through all instances. don’t know if thats possible
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.
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)
@marsara9
I see. Will just set home to the same as the one I search. I’m using Friendica so I’m used to copy links to the search field in order to fetch remote Lemmy posts.
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.
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.Can we only search by title with this? I’m getting a lot of unrelated results.
It searches the title and body. It also automatically searches for similar words like. Like ‘bike’, ‘biking’, ‘bikes’ (aka stemming). Granted though, I’m still improving the page ranking as time goes on.