I'm curious as to why Lemmy rarely shows up in search results on the main internet even if there is a post related to the search input. I've only ever seen a Lemmy result if Lemmy is specified. Is this because we're still relatively small or some other reason?

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[–] m_f@discuss.online 38 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

I've seen my own posts show up in specific search results based on the transcripts, which is nice to see. Tried searching for "Great Scott! The hatch is opening" on Google just now and it linked to my post at https://discuss.online/post/14315116. That's probably a bit of an issue actually. The link is for lemmy.dbzer0.com for my user on midwest.social to a community on lemmy.world and I just linked to it from discuss.online. Those might each be ranked independently even though it's the same content, vs all being ranked together if it's all centralized on one site like Reddit. Not really that hard to adjust for, but if Google doesn't care in the first place because they think they'll get fewer ad impressions out of it then it won't be changed.

Kagi has a feature for specifically searching the fediverse. It's a paid search engine, but IMO that ends up with their incentives aligned with mine.

[–] muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 8 points 5 days ago

Each fediverse instance is ranked separately that's the biggest issue. Each specific post is ranked based on the instance of the community its from due to content origin links. So the same post isn't ranked separately but each instance is only ranked based on the posts to its own communities.

[–] alk@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 5 days ago

Woah, I use Kagi and I didn't even know about this.