a lot of lemmy instances block google indexing purposefully. you would need to search using the instance search capabilities.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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a lot of lemmy instances block google indexing purposefully
Hopefully I'm not opening a can of worms by asking this, but, why?
To be more precise, why not let any search engine index? It seems like it'll grow Lemmy if people can use its data to search through.
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Because growth through opening up for capital interests is going to end badly. See Internet since 20 years
Because growth through opening up for capital interests is going to end badly. See Internet since 20 years
Hot take incoming (I'm going to hate hitting the [ENTER] key right now)...
Seceding the search results of the Internet to Reddit doesn't seem like a smart way of making Lemmy popular and used to the point of where it replaces Reddit.
All these posts and comments we all put here on Lemmy, that would benefit people from Internet search results, aren't being used.
You need to be smart about how you do battle, and not just pay attention to politics and nothing else.
If you don't join the fight, you won't win the War.
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I'd rather have a stable growth and these resources being accessible to the community, than to have google make money off of it, who is actively engaged in destroying open spaces and enshittify them.
Google doesnt care for traffic to Lemmy. Google cares for making money off the data they can grab. Not giving them the data directly is the only way to oppose them.
Your idea is to finance the war by selling weapons to your enemy, to use this metaphor of yours.
than to have google make money off of it, who is actively engaged in destroying open spaces and enshittify them.
Google doesnt care for traffic to Lemmy. Google cares for making money off the data they can grab. Not giving them the data directly is the only way to oppose them.
It's not about Google, it's about Reddit. Its about the users on the Internet doing searches.
I would say what I said if Google and DuckDuckGo had swapped dominate places, market-wise.
We need to have Lemmy be the best place to get search results from, and not Reddit.
And to do that, Lemmy has to be visible to Google, as it's the number one search results engine used by the most people on the Internet.
Having said that, we should actually make Lemmy available to all search engines on the Internet. We shouldn't be here to destroy Google, but to make Lemmy number one, over Reddit. Google is just a means to an end.
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Duckduckgo uses Bing for its index, so we run into the same problem with Microsoft.
Think about the steps involved. First Lemmy servers make all data available to these companies. Now these companies can exploit this data fully. But the next step, it leading to lemmy results being featured on their website is no guarantee. They can just keep it low.
And i dont care about Lemmy being larger than reddit. It is not just about reddit. It is about fundamentally creating a space thriving for a positove vision of how the internet should be. Handing influence to Google and Microsoft is fundamentally opposed to that.
Finally, reddit is destroying itself. Why should we compromise ourselves, when we can just watch reddit burning itself down, while more and more people join us?
Now these companies can exploit this data fully. But the next step, it leading to lemmy results being featured on their website is no guarantee. They can just keep it low.
But why would they do that? To them it would just be another source of data to walk through as part of building a search result.
And even if you were right, having it low is better than not having it there at all whatsoever.
Plus people can specify specific sites when they're doing a search, so they can ask for a specific Lemmy search and not have it be bypassed or be at low on the search results.
Finally, reddit is destroying itself. Why should we compromise ourselves, when we can just watch reddit burning itself down, while more and more people join us?
First, even if Reddit completely self-destructs and dies, it doesn't mean Lemmy will take over, because none of the search engines have Lemmy data, they'll just be a void that someone else will fill in.
Second, why is having our data available to search engines considered compromising ourselves?
I don't really give a flying F about hurting Google, as there's always going to be a number one search engine, and most likely that's always going to be owned by a corporation. That's a red herring anyways, its not something we should be worrying about (in relation to the Reddit versus Lemmy battle, and not just morally in general).
This isn't a destroy a corporation thing, it's a make Lemmy win over Reddit thing.
I care about the users searching via Google, I want them to think the best data set for searches is on Lemmy, and not Reddit.
I also care about the users here on Lemmy who won't bother typing out comprehensive guides for things like installing computer hardware and home improvement, if they know the results can't be searched/found on the Internet by people. At the end of the day they won't bother, instead they'll just point people here to a post on Reddit (or elsewhere like Medium) that has that information, and Lemmy will end up just being a also ran to Reddit as the go-to for comprehensive how to know things or do things.
Lemmy HAS to be searchable by the search engines on the Internet, if it would wants to win against Reddit. And ignoring Reddit and just expecting them to kill themselves, that's just not going to happen.
(By the way, enjoying the civil conversation we're having on this. Thanks for keeping it classy (in a good way).)
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This isn’t a destroy a corporation thing, it’s a make Lemmy win over Reddit thing.
I don't think we will get any further here. If you cannot see why Lemmy should be more than just "win over Reddit" i dont think anything will convince you. The problems of enshittification are hitting all aspects of the Internet and companies like Google and Microsoft are a major part of it and undoubtedly more problematic than reddit.
Again as i said, we should not focus on destroying corporations or any other external negative thing, but instead on building a positive version of the internet, so focus on a positive internal goal. Cooperating with the organizations who fundamentally oppose this vision of the internet is not going to help that.
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That seems rather counterproductive imo. The only way to get useful results on any search engine is to input "reddit" at the end of your search ime. So it seems like it's limiting the discovery and knowledge base of things here by not allowing for the same thing for Lemmy. Idk how to word that correctly.
More so the only way to get results that aren't ad-filled webpages that are paid to be top Google results is to search for reddit posts. Unfortunately a lot of the newer reddit stuff seems to be regurgitated bot accounts reposting stuff, so most useful stuff on Reddit is from before the enshittification.
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Try kagi search! It actually has a “lense” or search option that lets you directly search federated services like lemmy: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
How do you "try" Kagi without subscribing or creating an account? Is that possible?
I think you get a hundred free searches, then it's about 13 EUR per month for unlimited searches. I'd recommend Startpage, it's free and European.
Whoa, that's expensive for me. That's half of my internet bill just for a search engine. Lol
You can add "site:[whatever.tld]" to a Google search to restrict results to the specified domain. But as mentioned elsewhere many instances block indexing.
Conversely, you can add -site:Reddit.com and exclude Reddit results altogether.
That way you can search one instance but not the fediverse
Maybe not helpful, but Kagi search includes an option to search forums, which includes Lemmy. They have or had a dedicated Lemmy search, but I don't see it on my end right now.
This is definitely helpful. I hadn't noticed it. Kagi keeps on giving. Thank you!
It's still there for me, called Fediverse Forums. It's a lens you can disable or reorder so maybe you did and forgot about it? It's also different to Forums lens which doesn't seem to include Fediverse for some reason.
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Reddit has a decade long corpus of valuable knowledge from millions of individuals... Lemmy just doesn't have that scale or earned trust yet.
Yeah I don't browse Reddit anymore, but I still Google it for BIFL products and such. Lemmy just doesn't have the content for those use cases.
You should definitely post in a relevant community to help build the proverbial field of dreams!
Add this at the end of your search query to omit results from Reddit:
-site:https://www.reddit.com/
To specifically include results from Lemmy, you can just add a plus sign and replace the site name:
+site:https://lemmy.world/
Believe it or not Lemmy.world is not the only instance.
Yeah I'm new to Lemmy and still getting used to the whole instance thing. Apparently you can use "related:" to include results that are similar. In the below example, I did a Google search for "ukraine related:lemmy -site:reddit.com".
I'm guessing that search would turn up results for any instance LW is federated with? If not that would be disappointing!
Just as a FYI:
You don’t need the + to include things on Google. Anything you type that isn’t prefaced with a minus symbol already means “include this”. Also, using quotes means you want an exact match.
Additionally, you could shorten to this:
Search keywords here -site:Reddit.com site:lemmy.world “exact match keywords, if you want”
And just for funsies—you can use related: as an operator to find sites that are similar to something.
You don’t need the + to include things on Google.
Yeah I don't know why I added that. Kinda dumb on my part.
And just for funsies—you can use related: as an operator to find sites that are similar to something.
I think this is what OP was really looking for. I did a Google search for "ukraine related:lemmy -site:reddit.com" and got this, which seems to be the kind of results OP is looking for:
Why not just open your Lemmy app of choice and click search?
SearXNG also shows lemmy results in the social tab.
I currently don't do that (can not replace the treasure trove in reddit yet) but you can edit default search engine url and add something like
site:lemmy.world/ site:lemmy.ml/ site:lemm.ee/ site:sh.itjust.works/ site:lemmy.dbzer0.com/ site:lemmy.ca/ site:programming.dev/ site:lemmy.blahaj.zone/ site:discuss.tchncs.de/ site:spouli.xyz/
and make a seperate search engine shortcut for this. But as others have said, google is not great for this.
If you use searxng, then you can also include instance searches in default results . There is a seperate social media page(just like you have image or video tab), enable lemmy and mastodon stuff and use that.
Don't use Google, use Startpage.com instead, and add "lemmy" to your search terms.
That makes me wonder if the fediverse is disadvantaged by SEO. Each instance is likely "just" a domain to search engines.
-site:reddit.com should exclude results from that site.
Then you will find only the shitty articles
I want to whitelist Lemmy, not blacklist Reddit
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Just change "reddit" for the Lemmy instance of your choice and it is functionally the same.
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