this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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That feeling when you're googling the answer to some technical question, and your own Lemmy post appears 4 results down. (lemmy.one)
submitted 1 year ago by MxRemy@lemmy.one to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[–] t0fr@lemmy.ca 175 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Pretty cool to start seeing Lemmy posts in search results

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 27 points 1 year ago

This could be a big help to growing the overall threadiverse community since growth after the reddit bump has stalled. Not saying growth is intrinsically the goal, but rather that organic rather than force growth (which is how we got most of the users here) is preferable

[–] neutron@thelemmy.club 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hope the indexed instances don't get taken down years down the road, or have some sort of independent archive to consult later.

[–] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago

That's my biggest worry, however I've been programming for like 15 years now and there are forums I posted to that no longer exist, so I think its just a symptom of information as a whole.

Reddit was the bastion for this kind if stuff for a long time, and now there are a bunch of posts by this guy named [deleted] that have no post body so make of that what you will

[–] Holodeck_Moriarty@lemm.ee 70 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hey, does that mean we're finally googleable? That's pretty cool.

[–] epyon22@sh.itjust.works 47 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My guess is it'll vary instance by instance. You have to get on Google's radar to start search your content.

[–] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And that happens by people linking to it.

[–] mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Google Page Rank. I heard of that myth once before.

[–] Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Time to start injecting my posts with SEO nonsense

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit programming funny Google lemmy search results...

Don't mind me.

[–] mark@programming.dev 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] anonymoose@lemmy.ca 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmception

[–] tehmics@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Please tell me that's how you got here 😂

[–] anonymoose@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago

lol, I searched for this post title 😛

[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 36 points 1 year ago

I've noticed Lemmy appearing more in search results already. It's nice

[–] Gutek8134@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Quick reminder that Google's search results are partially impacted by your location, language, device type, search history and cookies.

Source: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/12412910?sjid=12467677493375888160-EU

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/10909618?sjid=12467677493375888160-EU#zippy=%2Chow-to-control-your-search-history

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

While true, I just tried in an incognito window and the post was #5

[–] victron@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Incognito window

Oh, my sweet summer child.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

I know, I know. I nearly added a disclaimer. Point is I'm not OP and I've never searched for that kind of thing. At most they know I like lemmy.

[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

https://imgur.com/a/bnOv1W7

[–] UsernameIsTooLon@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] eckte@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] Nelots@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

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

[–] keeyes@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] functor@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

Wait a minute…

[–] OrnateLuna@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Probably best not to use an ableist slur

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[–] olympicyes@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] CaptKoala@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] VentraSqwal@links.dartboard.social 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Programming.dev is a great instance

[–] hex@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

Yessir

[–] moondog@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] PuddingFeeling907@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 year ago

Heres comes the internet hug of death ;)

[–] anonymoose@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago

That's huge! Makes me realize that there's not really a way for anybody to know that a particular result is from Lemmy/the fediverse by looking at it, especially with the weird TLDs people use. I wonder if Google will eventually start recognizing ActivityPub clients differently?

[–] magikmw@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, all the kids Bing it now!

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nah, the cool kids Quack it.

[–] blackbrook@mander.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] magikmw@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] jasondj@ttrpg.network 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] gothicdecadence@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Maybe try SearXNG?

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

https://searx.space/

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

[–] 257m@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago

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

[–] KHTangent@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yay HaxeFlixel

That was one of my main introductions to programming in general

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 2 points 1 year ago

That is super neat. Google needs to put a fediverse, lemmy, or mastodon logo beside the result imo

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