So I've been working on a solution for this.

As I see it Google and others are going to have a hard if not impossible time to incorporate the fediverse, and the fact that the same content can exist on multiple servers.

So I'm working on a search engine specifically build, for Lemmy at least. Where it'll take you to whatever your preferred instance is when tapping on a search result.

I hope to have a MVP up and running in a few more days.

I am surprised noone mentioned https://fedi-search.com . It's working pretty well. Full credit to Benjamin Pryor for this

Digg.com was the big thing with Reddit trailing. Digg began tweaking the experience toward a more profitable model. I had already come to Reddit when they went too far and there was a sudden enormous migration from Digg to Reddit. Digg went from being THE social media aggregator to being nothing in a matter of weeks.

Reddit is more deeply rooted, so I think it will stick around, I'm cool if Reddit keeps those who are happy with corporate model busy so we can do our thing here.

In the future they eventually might be, for some instances. Though definitely not for all of them, since some of the instances might disable indexing.

I've actually already seen a few Lemmy results (lemmy.ml) in Google searches, the trouble is it doesn't link to individual posts, just the community so it's not particularly useful. So it definitely is possible, just needs to be improved to be able to index posts.

I have seen at least one user claim they got a result from lemmy when searching a question on google. YMMV though. Lemmy is a fraction of the size of reddit, it will take time for posts to reach the level that google starts indexing them specifically.

Maybe, but probable Google try to kill us

I think it is preferable to ask other search engines like DuckDuckGo to index Lemmy info. Google is full of garbage.

Reddit did not start out as the thing to google, it's 15+ years old, only in the last 5y I started prefixing my google searches with reddit.

Lemmy is not as unique as Reddit as a word. I get a lot of Lemmy Kilmister matches. But still hopeful

Correct me if I’m wrong but if individual admins allow their instances to be indexed wouldn’t the instance itself have some sort of metadata identifying it as a Lemmy branch?

I have been finding some!

You just need to backlink to Lemmy from an already known websites and the crawlers will find their way.

See: https://backlinko.com/link-building-strategies

About the search engine to dispaly the correct instance, that is something I don't think that works now and would require optimizations.

Respectfully: Fuck that.

If you want to find the best instant rice recommendations on Lemmy, Lemmy should have a functional post search function, rather than me relying on a malevolent corporate entity like google to index all the content.

Search has gone to shit as the Internet has embraced social media sites, an upside of this is that wikipedia+Lemmy+key word search, mayas accurate as asking Google Bard or bing, and they can be built on entirety open tech.

Basically use <query> site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:beehaw.org OR site:kbin.social (or whatever main instances you want to hit)

You can also use this for custom browser search keys like the following https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+site%3Alemmy.world+OR+site%3Alemmyml+OR+site%3Abeehaw.org+OR+site%3Akbin.social

I would argue that eventually, yes, one will be able to google search Lemmy just like Reddit.

I was searching for the “3 days no poop” meme. Lots of Lemmy stuff showed up.

You can use a search query to include only results with Lemmy's footer, which is consistent across all Lemmy instances. I made a post about it here: https://lemmy.world/post/342365

It’s up to the individual instance owner and Lemmy the software itself enabling SEO. It’s just getting started now so it will be long time before that.

@QuinicV Why would it not be possible? It depends on the software, if all text is open to be indexed. Kbin and Lemmy instances are basically open forum software and are indexed by search engines. You can test it in Google or other engines by forcing to search on the site only with site:lemmy.world are posts indexed? , which would be an empty search result if they were locked down like discord content.