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:
Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.
I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.
On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots...?
I just requested a !kbin bang. In the request form they ask for a search URL such as https://kbin.social/search?q={{{s}}}. I tested it and it worked on kbin. I am thinking that the more people request these bangs the more likely they get approved.
If you use firefox, you can use extensions to add any lemmy instances as a search engine options. Then, simply add an @ shortcut to the lemmy search engine options, and you'll have the ddg equivalent of bangs in your firefox search bar.
Firefox does allow you to change search engine straight from the search bar by typing @ shortcut. An example of this by default, typing @ddg on firefox makes you search with duckduckgo instead of your default search engine.
Keep in mind that you have to type the shortcut on the searchbar first, before typing anything else.
Someperson shall createth a copypasta of these terms of search that shall be needed to search on ALL of the kingdom of lemmy and associates. Until then let us pray that answered questions and questioned answers shall not disappear in the never ending greatness that is lemmy, as information shall be needed as needed shall be information!
Every browser supports adding custom search engines to the list. So you can prepare a query with all terms to be added and save it as a search engine.
Fediverse search based on Google/Bing
Somebody posted a tool that handles this sort of searching for a number of popular instances that do not fit the usual patterns, see https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/52753
Fwiw I don't think they were complaining. I found it useful to clarify that it's not a complete search.
I frequently append "Reddit" to searches for more informative results. I can imagine that in the future it would be great do perform simalr searches covering all of the fediverse
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
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
Yes and no. It won't search kbin.social directly, but federation works via mirroring content, so any posts that have reached the site being searched will, well, be on the site being searched.
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%.
@[email protected] 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.