Yes but that search doesn't take you to the instance that you are logged into already. Which is one of my main goals with this site. While that did give me the inspiration for this and has the power of Google behind it, it lacks knowledge about how the fediverse actually works.

Eventually. I'm waiting on a bug in Lemmy itself to be fixed. Mainly once I can post a link to a post here and anyone can click on it without leaving their home instance.

Oh wanted to add, as a workaround for now you can set your home instance to lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Because of how the fediverse works, searching the larger older instances should have a fairly complete copy of content.

Once I do "fix" this though, note that you may click on a link and get a 404 page. As that post may not be on your home instance.

One rule I will always follow for this project is that if I display a link, that link MUST take you to your home instance and that link MUST point to the post in question (but I cannot guarantee that you won't get an error, just that you won't be taken to a completely different post)

API calls. Primarily it just uses /api/v3/post/list.

Funny enough though, one of my first versions I tried to use mass federation, but ran into technical issues.

That's on my todo list. For the initial release I wanted to get posts working primarily.

See: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/blob/master/server/src/crawler/crawler.rs#L178

It searches the title and body. It also automatically searches for similar words like. Like 'bike', 'biking', 'bikes' (aka stemming). Granted though, I'm still improving the page ranking as time goes on.

Correct. As I can only provide links to posts that are on your selected home instance. Eventually I'll change this but you'll get a 404 page for links that aren't on your home instance, but see my P.S. below.

P.s. there have been changes to the Lemmy API that have prevented me from getting updates for about a month now. So most of the results you're seeing are from old posts only. Until I can rebuild the crawler or find a new API there won't be any new content.

Ya, now if everyone can stop finding bugs! So I can take some time off. /jk

Great heads up

I just don’t get why people would join SOCIAL media if they don’t want to their posts public. Its like having a group meeting in the middle of a public square and complain people saw them

Maybe they should just use discord or or private communities instead

I've already got some complaints about that. You can see one of the issues raised on GitHub.

At the moment, I'm only picking up mastodon posts that are federated to Lemmy, but you can't choose Mastodon as a preferred-instance, yet. When and/if I decide to add Mastodon support, I'll reach out to the admins over there to get feedback first.

Edit and note to any server admin: If you want to block the crawler from hitting your site, just add lemmy-search to your robots.txt and crawling will be prevented. But this doesn't stop cross-federation posts from being picked up on another instance.

Due to a one of my primary goals of having links open in your home instance, you can only search a single instance at a time.

There's an open issue about this though but it requires some changes to Lemmy itself to work.

Well, we were probably already due or going on past due for something to best replace the old "site:reddit.com" with "site:lemmy.world" for instance.

Not yet but I can add this feature

There is a public API now. While I won't support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.

When you search for posts you're just matching against the title or body. For communities it's searching the posts within that community.

There's also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.

So I'm not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I'd share.