I am using both Mastodon and Twitter, enjoying Mastodon more and more. Only thing that is really annoying is the lack of good search, i know the reasons behind it, but still I hope some solutions for this will be found in the future. #Mastodon#Search
Apparently people complaining about #Searches here are already screwed in any case, as Cälckey seem to bypass whatever "Not searchable" instances + setting picks?
You mention something someone has an 'Antenna' for & they can see Unlisted posts like Searches, too, though not following you. This seems a dubious or risky thing for trans people who for obvious reasons seem to ask for better protection the most here.
How to (not) find a toot:
First i tried by scrolling through the account of the person. Did not work, because i did not know the date of the toot. Scrolled a bit through their 'Posts and replies': same.
I did not know if i had bookmarked it, and i have A LOT of bookmarks, so did not waste my time on that.
So i requested to download my archive.
The tar.gz i managed to open via cmd, and then the json file in simple Notepad, and Ctrl-F searched for the name of the person.
There i found my reply (not the toot of the person i replied to obviously, the archive is ofcourse only of your own tootsies), and with the link it provided i retrieved my reply here on Mastodon.
To only find out, the toot i replied to was gone.... also the reply i got is deleted. It turned out to be from nov 2022, so that's a long long long way to scroll back to, so although the hassle it worked out quite okayish.
Oh wow i seem to have a new search function, to search my timeline - and it looks like you can search without hashtags! Amazing, is this the new @Mastodon search function that was announced a few weeks ago? #Mastodon#Search
Review my following* for new content, so I go to preferences then select followers/following*, then select the following* column in relationships. If they aren't on my server, then I can't "a bunch of things" like see all of their posts (and potentially boost them).
Where do I look from within my server to see those I follow specifically because I like their take and want to boost it so I can possibly find others who also like their take so I can find others I might want to follow?
I recognize this is a process for building an "echo chamber" without an algorithm if all I was interested in was politics or social causes, etc. However, I want to find other science-y people on topics of interest who might not be #-ing enough to be found with #search
Find one of each following posts from my server, bookmark it and then use my bookmark list to stay on my server and select the following's name from there, manually sifting down through my list of bookmarks?
I've already thought about moving it to the fediverse, as it previously relied on Twitter and their API, but it's a bit more difficult here without full-text search.
Despite my recent whinging about search results in DuckDuckGo since it became a front-end for Bing, I've noticed a curious thing over a few weeks of testing with other search engines. It usually returns better results for NZ-specific searches than either Mojeek or Monocles.de.
I paid for #Neeva and it was great for a while. Then they kept offering all kinds of useless add-ons that had nothing to do with the main mission of #search (what I signed in for). Then they sold out for big bucks. It seems to me a classic case of #BigTech believing it always has to “improve” the product, that growth is necessarily good, and/or it has to give its employees something to do.
Whelp with the shutdown of #neeva I have made the switch to #brave#search which seems to have improved a lot and has some of the same features I was enjoying. I don't wanna use #DDG because never got good results with it and they just proxy other search engines... Brave Search is like Neeva doing their own crawling and has some really nice modern features. I have also decided to give Brave Browser a second shot, so far not to shabby.
Before we had the Internet, Google and search there was this, go-to book. A massive bound FAQ it was, covering a really broad subject spectrum. Retrieved it from a storage room yesterday. I’ve missed thumbing through it. Gonna just leave it laying around for a while before storing it away again. Apologies for the less than perfect image. #books#search#research
even vanilla Mastodon has some search features that are not obvious from the web UI. if your admin has installed ElasticSearch for full-text search, you can use these operators:
• "quoted phrase" will match exactly that phrase, with those words, in that order.
• +term will require the results to contain that term. searching for frog pond will normally find posts that contain either frog or pond; use +frog +pond to find posts that only contain both.
• -term will exclude that term from results. the query frog -pond will find only posts that contain frog but not pond.
• from:localusername will find posts from the given user on the same instance. this is great for finding only your own posts. (the from: operator is not documented yet.)
• from:remoteusername@remotedomain should find posts from the given user on another instance, but doesn't work as the only part of a search due to this bug: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18791
vanilla Mastodon always returns search results in relevance order, so if you search for frog pond, it will return posts that have both frog and pond first, and then posts that contain either frog or pond but not both. notably, it cannot sort results by date.
there is a workaround for finding posts from a single user tagged with a single hashtag, sorted newest first: construct a URL like //instance.tld/@username/tagged/hashtag
I was reading something few days ago that used "LTT" without expansion. First, second, & third thoughts were of "Tamil Tigers" as in LTTE, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
For that matter, missing is a actually useful #search mechanism to use multiple hashtags with "AND" operation, non-hashtag fixed strings, negation. #mastodonUX#brokenSearch
@zeh@alcinnz
>have been seeing the worse results from duckduckgo
We're not the only ones who have been complaining about this recently. I was very happy with DDG for years and I still really like the fact that I can search the Free Software Directory by adding !fsd to my keywords. But their general search results have gone massively downhill in the last year or two, and I blame Bing.
@zeh@alcinnz I've been experimenting with a few search engines recently, including Mojeek, Metager.org, SearchMySite.net and the Searx instances at Monocles.de.
I've also figured out to how to configure my Firefox-based mobile browser to search for videos directly on YewTube (Invidio.us instance), and for green tech info on Appropedia.org, and I plan to add more sites to this (eg search.joinpeertube.org).
If you're a fediverse dev or a fedivangelist, please read this! This is our chance to really get in to the nitty gritty of search opt in permissions at the AP level!