NOTE: the late "Lemmy" is a beloved Brit* musician from an enjoyable rock band, perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues? (sorry, I just didn't know him very well; kinda before my time)
Okay, what I'm trying to explain here is how we search for things and how we find them, particularly when we include the magical word: "Lemmy" in our searches.
For example-- I can just half-awake, lazily type something like "reddit" + search term, and BOOM! Robert's your avuncular figure.**
Now, by comparison, hopping on an instance, so far I've found that searches within the Lemmysphere are remarkably strong. (well, at least for lemm.ee; I love my instance)
Unfortunately, that's not how most people search and find us, which more typically involves Google, etc.
Hence my question, laddies & lassies-- i.e. is there anything we can do to influence how this search-stuff works...?
* see, I always find a way to relate things back to Europe, haha
** like "there you go," ie. "Bob's your uncle," a classic Brit pub-phrase
Reddit is all on one domain, so a search on that is a fairly simple thing to do. Lemmy is a lot of different inter-connected sites, most of which don't even contain "Lemmy" in their name, making it a much more difficult ask.
And to make matters worse, because all of those domains have a good chunk of nearly identical content, they end up appearing like SEO content farm spam to the algorithm. It's like all those sites that used to clone Stack Overflow back in the day.
Theoretically this shouldn't be a problem with proper canonicalization but I don't know if it is done well enough or if it is bad for the SEO ranking regardless.
As someone on mbin rather than lemmy, lemmy isn't even all of us.
A search engine could easily enough set up their own Lemmy server to search from. Same with Mastodon.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
Sure, but if Google actually did that, a lot of people here would go apeshit about them profiting from this content.
I'd go apeshit happy that they see us as relevant
I love how reading through this comment thread pretty much follows my internal monologue...
Precisely.
And that's why it's so cool that Kagi has an option to limit your search to the fediverse.
Shouldn't it be more or less the same with lemmy? We have a few major instances that are in sync with other instances, so indexing either of them should cover different sites.