You can self-host Lemmy-Search, it's probably the best option right now. Unfortunately their official instance is down, what a shame that no one else is hosting a public instance.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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Searxng has options to do such a thing
Add this search string in Firefox/Librewolf/Mull. On Desktop you need the addon "add custom search engine", on mobile its integrated. (No idea why)
Tor
There dont seem to be discoverable lemmy instances on Tor, even though there is a guide.
You could use this for searching lemmy over tor:
Note that the (intext:"modlog" & "instances" & "docs" & "code" & "join lemmy") method seems better. The fedi-search is also awesome.
On desktop you can somehow enable it in about:config if you don't want to install an addon.
Damn? Where? I found something called "newsearch" but no GUI appeared on Librewolf
All content should be very similar since itβs federated so pick your least defederated instance and try it. Kagi offers a fediverse search lens.
Not mine:
Search every lemmy instance:
You can appendΒ (intext:"modlog" & "instances" & "docs" & "code" & "join lemmy")Β to your search query to search through all Lemmy instances. Works with Google, Startpage, SearX.
Could you give an example URL?
To search for fish on lemmy, input
fish (intext:"modlog" & "instances" & "docs" & "code" & "join lemmy")
into google
This is really nice.
No equivalent way to do it on Duckduckgo, that you know of, right?
Try it on duckduckgo, I have never tested it. They try to replicate a lot of googleβs functionality.
Thank you. Worked like a charm
Google smacks your SEO rating if you have the same content as other websites. The fediverse will face this problem for a while until search engines find a solution to it.
The default web UI search utils are very strong though. If you know content is on Lemmy, you can search by post type/author/instance/etc and find it quite fast.
Depends a lot of which client you use, so it's hard to say. But the built-in feature accessible via web is pretty good.
Example result when using a random SearxNG instance from the list : https://searx.space/
And the built-in search on Lemmy is usually rather fine for me.
The built-in search feature is actually quite decent I find, is it not working well for you?
Perhaps I've missed a trick, it only searches for communities. I'm using Jerboa, the 'official' app.
There's no way to search for individual posts or comments.
Voyager searches posts & communities. Looks like an iOS app (not surprising given its lineage) which a few months in is still taking some getting used to but its been a good replacement for the no longer developed Liftoff. Definitely worth trying
I use the Eternity client from F-Droid just for searching. It has extensive filtering support. It's very sad that it lacks maintainership, this fork of Infinity for Reddit finally got me to migrate from reddit during the exodus. It still works though and the search is wonderful.
Did you try Raccoon for Lemmy? I am using it now, and was an Infinity user some time ago.
Thanks, I'll try it
I tried out Raccoon for a while, but I always accidentally up or downvoted posts while scrolling because it was super sensitive. So I switched back to Eternity (Nightly). But it may be fixed in the meantime...
Do they maintain it? Has the same level of customisation?
Should work just fine for posts and comments as well, for example, here's a search result containing your comment
I'm being dim. This type of query can't cover instances that lemmee, in this case, isn't subscribed to, can it?
That's true, it will only show content which has been federated to lemm.ee, so indeed if you want to search for more content than is available on your instance, you would need some additional tools for that.
That's what I thought, phew!
Global searches for things is how I discovered subreddits that are my topic of interest but are called - for me anyway - unusual names! I can't expect any one instance to carry all of Lemmy so I was asking about a search engine.
That said, your search method is probably much better than what I'm doing now! Thank-you.
Well I'll be damned. I will start trying this more.
I find it decent for finding communities. I've never found a way to search actual content, either.