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Lemmy posts are starting to pop up on search results with Google (+ other search engines) (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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To see the original discussion, you can see this thread: https://lemmy.ca/post/8488573

To open the post on your instance you can go to !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world and see the recent top posts, or use an app/frontend/ browser extension (ex. !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca)

Alternatively, here is the screenshot from the post.

I also wanted to share this tip for how you can filter for Lemmy posts when searching:

Search using site:home_instance. So if I wanted to find recommended phones, I could go site:lemmy.ca recommended phones. Since every instance has its own collection of posts, you will be getting results from all over Lemmy. The limitation is that you won't see content from instances that aren't federated with yours, but you probably didn't want to see that stuff anyway since you picked your instance for a reason. You can also put any instance into the search if you wanted different results.

Question to everyone, what does Lemmy need to make it easier for people to find content? What are the implications of the Fediverse on how people might find content in the future?

One thing is that people are more likely to get posts from the larger instances, likely because more people are linking to them and opening those links? Another thought was the common complaint about how our post links aren't community specific. While I can search for posts using the method above, I can't search within a specific community like I can with Reddit (ex. I can't search site:lemmy.ca/c/Vancouver recommended restaurants

EDIT: The issues for it are here, looks like the devs are good with it now and someone just needs to implement it:

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[-] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think the instance is the issue like the other comment is suggesting (although I don't quite understand the specifics of how it works). I'm playing around with it myself right now

If I search site:sh.itjust.works Hello and set it to 24 hours, I do see posts. So timing should be ok too

Update: So I think what's happening is that the post needs to go through a few stages when it's on a different instance

Someone posts on a foreign instance (https://foreign.example.com/post/123444
Someone on your instance views the post, which generates a link on your instance for that post (ex. https://example.com/post/135799)
Google indexes your home instance and grabs that post

So we're probably between steps 2 and 3 right now?