That feeling when you're googling the answer to some technical question, and your own Lemmy post appears 4 results down.

Hopefully this kind of content is ok here. Up until recently, when I would be searching for some kind of technical info, the top (and best) results would usually all be Reddit posts. I was very pleasantly surprised to do that this time and find a Lemmy post instead!

…It did happen to be a post from me, so unfortunately didn’t answer my question at all, but I still thought it was really neat and wanted to share. Has anyone else seen Lemmy stuff getting indexed and turning up in their search results?

JWBananas,
@JWBananas@startrek.website avatar

So you know those buttons at the top of Google search results?

Images, News, Videos, etc?

You’ll never guess what new button they’re testing out now.

imgur.com/a/bnOv1W7

UsernameIsTooLon,

It’s not just reddit. They’re AI assisted buttons with more tabs for commons searches. Many people add “reddit” after a search to find answers specifically on reddit. It’s also catered differently per user so you might see TikTok or Quora as other buttons up top as well.

Google search results will also slightly vary among users.

jasondj,

Happens to me all the time with my Networking, Fortinet, Ansible, and Cisco subreddits, and that’s exactly why I’m hesitant to purge and delete my account.

That and I haven’t found comparable communities here.

eckte,

‘Googling something’, as he enters the most specific question ever.

Nelots,

I get it. Finding the answers to super niche questions is just about the only thing I still go to reddit for.

olympicyes,

I’ve noticed that the quality of the questions and answers on technical topics has gotten noticeably worse since July. Not surprising these types of users would move away from Lemmy first. On the Ubuntu subreddit I’ve noticed a relative increase in confidently incorrect answers.

VentraSqwal,

Ya, it still has a backlog of great answers to questions from the past, but hopefully as new questions are asked and new issues are brought up, Lemmy can grow that backlog as well.

CaptKoala,

If it weren’t bad for everyone overall, I would support intentionally giving wrong solutions on Reddit. As it is, I simply only go there now for the pre-lemmy knowledge as many do, though as Lemmy starts getting a deeper knowledge base I expect that will slowly change, I find the quality of both the questions and answers on Lemmy to be much greater nine times out of ten.

AdmiralShat,

Programming.dev is a great instance

hex,

Yessir

moondog,
@moondog@hexbear.net avatar

One time I was looking up a question related to obsidian MD, only to find out there was a post about my exact issue, I open it, I’ve already upvoted it. I read closer, it’s my own post from 6mo ago.

blindbunny,

Huh did Google start indexing lemmy?

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Funnily enough my own instance has a such a bad SEO that when I searched up my username (to find out what is out there) I found all other instances my comments got copied to but not my own freaking instance.

Oh well. Yes Google does index instances but how well and often is another story.

syzizeky,

Maybe google downranks db0 instance like it does other pirate sites?

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Sounds like a possibility.

isVeryLoud,

Some instances disabled crawling, namely lemmy.ca

lemann,

appreciateUsefulInfoCallback(true, setVeryLoud);

ipkpjersi,

Don’t forget to nest your callback a few levels deep, that way it’s easier to use.

CoderKat,

But why? Part of why reddit became so useful was its ability to use it for searching. Even though I no longer visit reddit regularly anymore, I still use site:reddit.com on many of my google searches because it gets better results for opinion or explanation based topics. Similarly, I found tons of useful local info from my local city’s subreddit. I can’t say the same about the Lemmy community, which I only see if I explicitly remember to go to it because the sorting doesn’t show small instances.

isVeryLoud,

I… don’t know. Performance? Doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s all federated.

You can do site: lemmy.world and find lemmy.ca posts since they’re federated.

blindbunny,

I honestly don’t think Google crawlers knows how to index the fediverse but I am kind of talking out of my ass rn.

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Fediverse is just another website. It literally finds my username on many other instances posts got replicated to.

9point6,

So I thought the biggest issue with Lemmy and Google’s pagerank is that federated content looks a lot like that blogspam that just aggregates content from elsewhere.

Perhaps they’re adapting things

mo_lave,

based

257m,

How do I make DDG only returns results from lemmy. Usually you can make it only return results from a specific website (like reddit.com) but you can’t do that because of different instances.

Geth,

That’s a problem I notice with Lemmy. You can point search engines at specific instances but not all instances which makes finding content that’s only present on Lemmy very difficult.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup. lemmy seems to work okay, but it would miss something like !programming.dev since it doesn’t have lemmy in the name.

If you know where the community is hosted, you can probably do site:instance and get decent results.

What we really need is a better integrated search inside lemmy. That way I won’t feel the need to use a search engine as often. If that works, perhaps someone could make a single site that tracks all popular communities (just post comment, not comments) for better SEO, and then links to the actual posts. Kind of like those StackOverflow copy sites that I keep running into.

sixfold,

Crawling and indexing lemmy inter-instance would be an incredible boon to discoverability on the platform.

keeyes,

there was this movie I liked a lot that I found hard to find people to discuss it with. I talked to a couple people about it on reddit one time, but that was really the extent of the discussions. Eventually I saw the movie again on TV and it got me wondering if there was anymore more info about it, like theories or whatever. So I Google it and come across this thread that looked interesting, and as I’m reading through I thought that this person knows what they’re talking about and has some good ideas. Eventually I realize it was my own comments I was looking at from before, I just didn’t recognize them at first. I’m actually retarded

dutchkimble,

Is it Operation Sandman ?

functor,

Wow this is so insightful this guy must be really cool and smart

Wait a minute…

OrnateLuna,

Probably best not to use an ableist slur

gothicdecadence,

Maybe try SearXNG?

github.com/searxng/searxng

searx.space

Or maybe something like perplexity.ai to point towards where to look

KHTangent,
@KHTangent@lemmy.world avatar

Yay HaxeFlixel

That was one of my main introductions to programming in general

mark,
@mark@programming.dev avatar

Take that, Stack Overflow! Programming.dev on deck!!! Let’s gooooooo

lemann,

I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a “programming reddit” of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.

The only thing holding it back is probably a setting for showing local communities by default, when logged out browsing. Whenever that feature arrives in Lemmy then 👌

randomaccount43543,

Any recommended communities in programming.dev?

MxRemy,

You could come to the community I (poorly) moderate, that this post is indirectly about 😝

!haxe

olympicyes,

If you need programming.dev, it’s recommended to set up an account there. The local communities page is very informative.

lemann,

I follow !programming, !programmer_humor, and !webdev

The first two are relatively busy if you’re looking for content

snowe,
@snowe@programming.dev avatar

hm. when I test in a private browsing mode it shows Local by default. That doesn’t happen for you?

also:

I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a “programming reddit” of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.

is exactly what I was going for when I created the instance so I’m glad to see others think it could succeed!

RickyRigatoni,
@RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml avatar

You know it’s a unique question when lemmy is on the front page.

ElBarto,
@ElBarto@sh.itjust.works avatar

Google: I don’t know, ask these nerds.

magikmw,

Your first mistake was unironically using google to search for anything in 2023.

SpaceNoodle,

Yeah, all the kids Bing it now!

sugar_in_your_tea,

Nah, the cool kids Quack it.

lemann,

Nah, all the cool kids Woof it!

^^after ^^paying ^^the ^^$5 ^^subscription

SpaceNoodle,

If you’re referring to DuckDuckGo, it’s just Bing under the hood.

magikmw,

I’ve tried to confirm, but can’t find any info on that. Care to provide a source?

SpaceNoodle,

You can also search Bing and DDG side by side in private browsing sessions.

duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/…/sources/

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#:~:text=It is ….

sugar_in_your_tea,

Right, but the hood is so shiny. :)

blackbrook,

I just bang my head on the table and save a step.

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