Why YSK: Searching topcs on reddit was simple matter of entering desired term and prepending or appending keyword reddit. With lemmy’s decentralised structure finding particular topic without knowing to which, or rather if even there is community dealing with such topic(s) can be a headache inducing hurdle. So appending simple:
site: lemmy.*
site:lemmy.*
to Your google search feature can ease up search.
P.S.
to avoid certain domains You can use e.g.:
-site: beehaw.org
-site:beehaw.org
@edit: removed spaces thank You @inquisitor1965@kbin.social
I’ve had better results searching through the instances themselves because Google doesn’t always index the keywords on time. On caveat of this method is that if the instance doesn’t have the syncing out the instance where the info is from being propagated, then this trick would not work
Not all lemmy sites fit that though. You’ve already lost out on sh.itjust.works, beehaw, lem.ee, sopuli.xyz etc
OP is sharing a very useful tip for people new to the Fediverse. Let’s not allow our pedantry to get in the way of what is still a helpful tip please.
Only downside is you won’t find stuff from domains without lemmy in them, e.g. feddit.de
There’s a silver lining here. It will prompt people to search from their instance instead of giving more traffic to Google.
Wouldn’t the search results be even more limited in that case, though?
So this is a good idea in principle, but there are a lot of sites that don’t follow the “lemmy.tld” format. I checked the list of instances connected to our site, lemmy.ninja. We’ve been up for a few days, so we’ve accumulated a lot of instances by now. Following the Lemmy.* format gave me 285 out of 585 of our current instances. So just under 50%.
@Kichae@kbin.social pointed out here why it may not really matter too much. As long as everything is pretty well cross pollinated, things should be discoverable. I imagine the bigger the user base the better it will be.
Pretty sure there shouldn’t be a space between the term “site:” and the domain
Sorry missed that in preview
But will it omit other things like kbin.social?
probably. So you could add it as a site search string; such as:
site:lemmy.* OR site:kbin.social -site:beehaw.org cats
lemmy.* doesn’t work for beehaw.org anyway
Sorry,
correct example might have been
-site:lemmy.lm
-site:lemmy.ml
@edit: corrected domain thank You @toki@lemmy.world
deleted by creator
YSK: This doesn’t work in DuckDuckGo because I just independently had the idea to try this a few days ago and returned no results. I didn’t think to try on Google. I believe DuckDuckGo is running on Microsoft Bing so it likely doesn’t work there either
On DuckDuckGo you can use:
!g site: lemmy.*
to be redirected to an anonymous Google search
Duckduckgo has a bang for Mastodon:
!msocial
. Maybe we should start putting in requests for Fediverse bangs:!lemmy
,!kbin
,!beehaw
, etc.It would be better if they would add
!fediverse
that searches all of the sites. Maybe one day!Being able to easily search the entire fediverse woule be amazing.
I assume msocial only searches mastodon.social?
looks like it.
!msocial {{{string}}
points tohttps://mastodon.social/tags/string
. So,!msocial Cats
searcheshttps://mastodon.social/tags/Cats
.