I keep see people complaining about not being able to find active communities that match their interests. So I've added a new feature to https://www.search-lemmy.com/ that allows you to search posts for a particular topic and then it tells you which communities have the most posts matching your search query.

And assuming that you've set your home instance correctly, those links will even open up in your home instance, so that you can subscribe directly to them.

For example, if you search for 'linux' (https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=linux&page=1) it gives you a link to each community, tells you which instance it's on and how many matches it found for your query.

All of the same filters that you can use on the normal search can be used here as well. So if you just want to find the best community that mentions linux on lemmy.world (https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=linux+instance%3Alemmy.world&page=1), you can filter by just that instance. Click on the Search Tips button to see a list of all of the available filters.

P.S. I'm aware of https://lemmyverse.net/ etc... and while those are great as well, this allows you to search to see what people are actually talking about on the various communities.

Again, if you have any feature requests or find any bugs, PLEASE reach out or ideally go to my github (https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search) and log a bug there.

A couple days ago I updated https://search-lemmy.com/ to 0.4.0.

New features, that several people were asking for:

• The UI has been overhauled and it should be much easier to find your home instance now.
• Search itself has been overhauled. Increase search performance significantly. I also automatically search for related terms as well. You may now see fewer search results, but ideally they should be more relevant. You can also now include basic syntax like:
  • quotes: "some terms that must be together"
  • negative terms: cat -dog (shows posts about cats that don't mention dogs)
  • either or: cat OR dog (shows posts about either cats or dogs). The default search behavior is now an implicit AND, but order doesn't matter.
• I've added several new filters that you can use including:
  • !safeoff -- Disables safe search allowing NSFW posts to appear in the search results (NSFW is now hidden by default)
  • since:YYYY-MM-DD -- shows only posts that have occurred since the specified date
  • until:YYYY-MM-DD -- same as above but in reverse. It will only posts up to the given date.
• I've removed the preferred-instance query parameter from the results URL so it should be easier to share links to search results now.
• The date the post was created or last updated is now displayed in the search results.

Bug Fixes:

• Site performance should now be stable. Fixed a bug related to the database pool that was causing the site to hang.
• Fixed a bug that would cause broken links.
• Fixed various bugs with the crawler causing posts to be missed.

Known Issues:

• If you set your home-instance to a fairly small instance, the number of search results is also relatively small. Once (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3259) is resolved. I should be able to show links regardless of what your home instance is set to, allowing you to search the entire Fediverse.
• Currently searching only looks at the post title and body. Comments aren't indexed either. This also is dependent on the above issue on Lemmy itself.

Finally some things to note:

I've started to refactor the code to abstract away Lemmy from the actual search engine. As I now start to prepare to search other Fediverse instances like Kbin, and maybe even Mastodon, etc...

I shared bits and pieces of this before, but it's officially up and running now: https://www.search-lemmy.com/

This is an enhanced search engine for Lemmy. With a few primary goals:

• You can choose a preferred instance. After choosing what your primary instance is, and performing a search ALL links will open in that instance.
• This aims to be a replacement for using site:reddit.com in Google, but just for the fediverse.
• You can filter the search results by:
  • Instance -- This will filter the results to only show communities that belong to a particular instance. Just type something like instance:lemmy.wrold or instance:https://lemmy.world/. This is separate from your preferred instance, such that you can search for posts on lemmy.world while still opening them on lemmy.ml.
  • Community -- You can refine the search by a specific community. You use the same syntax that you'd use here community:[!fediverse@lemmy.world](/c/fediverse@lemmy.world).
  • Author -- Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as: author:@marsara9@lemmy.world.
• The entire thing is open-source. You can view the code and even host your own instance... See more details here: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search.

NOTE: This only supports Lemmy instances for now. Other fediverse type instances may be in the future depending on how this works out.

I've been working on this over just the last few weeks, so it hasn't had a chance to crawl much of the fediverse yet. For now it only supports lemmy.world and lemmy.ml but other preferred-instances will come online as time goes by.

If anyone finds any bugs, and I'm sure you will, or if anyone has any suggestions PLEASE raise an issue on GitHub for me to track. Lastly, if anyone wants to help contribute please feel free to reach out.

NOTE TO SERVER ADMINS: You can prevent your site from being crawled by adding lemmy-search to your robots.txt for the user-agent.