Google search from every aggregator on the fediverse?

I've heard you can do a google search and append say kbin.social to get results just from kbin, but if I wanted to treat the fediverse's content like reddit's, is there a way to do the google search on just everything that's on the fediverse?

edit:
I've been hearing people will want to make search tools to help us search the fediverse, and in the future even give us options on our servers to opt out of being indexed if we want.

Also this is a search site someone else recommended where you can choose which search engine to search the fediverse: https://fedi-search.com

techno156,

No, there's no aggregator/indexer quite like that just yet. Your best bet is to just hope that the search shows up something useful because you captured the right key words.

Mintyytea,

aww that's kind of a bummer then, I'm a little sad since I thought this made it equal to reddit's search. I don't really care for reddit becoming good for stuff like tiktok/youtube shorts, but I like it a lot for being able to search easily for real people's inputs. I thought there was no con for federation since the content is shared, but the decentralization seems to make it harder to search that content in the fediverse

foo,

I just tried a random Google search appending 'site:lemmy.*' and it returned results from a bunch of Lemmy insurances with 'lemmy' in the domain name.

Of course that's a far cry from "everything in the fediverse" but it's a start...

llama,
@llama@midwest.social avatar

You could try it with "join Lemmy" OR "powered by kbin" in quotes at the end of the query, since one of the two is shown at the bottom of every fediverse page

Mintyytea, (edited )

Omg that sounds great! Thanks, I'm not that familiar with that google search filter and the possibilities we can put :)

Edit: I tried it, but I'm not sure yet, I think it adds a lot of entries I wasn't expecting, but it's still another great option to do the search. I tried it with: < desantis "join Lemmy" OR "powered by kbin" >

CoderKat,
CoderKat avatar

Probably because "join Lemmy" is way too broad and Lemmy sites don't have good page rank scores yet. With any luck, the sites becoming bigger will improve results.

That said, I'm not sure if the page rank algorithm will even work very well on them without changes, since there's so many possible URLs for different instances view of the same post. It likely dilutes the rank of any particular result.

As an aside, even if Google worked well, I suspect it would end up causing the biggest instances to only get bigger. Google gives weight to what other people link to, and that's most likely to be from the largest instances. Also, the whole idea of creating new instances probably doesn't mesh well with how web search works, since it isn't likely to trust new, unfamiliar sites.

Mintyytea,

so complicated :o that's true, it's kind of another con of making an account on and staying on a small instance then. If the instance makes its own communities, and the instance plans to stay small ish to be a lot of decentralized servers, then the content might not be well searchable for the small instance. idkkkk, it feels like there's pros of the fediverse, but then sometimes it's like a double edged sword or something.

couragethecowardlydog,

This is the answer

couragethecowardlydog,

If we could find something that's the same across every Lemmy instance I could craft a Google dork for it. Like if every instance contains the same header or something similar. There's loads of things Google indexes that aren't just domain names.

Mintyytea,

oooh, so nice, thank you! I will use that. I didn't even know we can put that wild card *
I tested with " site:lemmy.* reddit "

The only thing is, I think not every lemmy instance is named that way. I think these are also lemmy servers - sh.itjust.works, vlemmy.net, lemm.ee

Awwab,
Awwab avatar

Even if the domain isn't using Lemmy in the name I would think the page still has the word Lemmy in the metadata so it should still show up if you just treated it like how you append reddit to the end of a search.

foo,

There are more and more Lemmy instances (servers) every day sooooo this isn't a terrifically comprehensive search but, if you're looking for something in a federated Lemmy instance, one of the Lemmy.* instances probably knows about it... Maybe that's enough?

In other words, I would hazard a guess that almost everything in the lemmyverse can probably be found by searching the Lemmy.* instances.. assuming they expose their content to Google in the first place.

foo,

It looks promising, I searched for something using site:lemmy.* and one of the results was on sh.itjust.works and was found because of the federated URL:

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/1ad2c38e-1086-42d7-8fe6-e5ffff9e8d7d.png

Mintyytea,

I guess my only concern left then is for the different aggregators, since I thought there wouldn't be any difference really between kbin and lemmy (or the others)

hellerphant,
hellerphant avatar

I’d like to know this too. I do a lot of XYZ review reddit into google when making purchasing decisions. The black out left me without a solid resource of user opinion!

beeehawwww,

You can look at the cached version of pages, i think you have to click the options button next to the search result.

Perry,
Perry avatar

Maybe I'm just being dumb, but wouldn't site: kbin.social also catch everything that kbin.social is federated with? You wouldn't of course literally be searching the entire fediverse, but it would functionally be more or less the same thing, as I understand it.

Mintyytea,

I think it won’t be able to get everything since the search result is the webpage that’s gonna be on different communities.

I tried these searches, and they have different results. I’d be missing some content on the fediverse on the topic if I didn’t remember to include all these

pear site:kbin.social
pear site:kbin.*
pear site:lemmy.*

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