Hopefully this kind of content is ok here. Up until recently, when I would be searching for some kind of technical info, the top (and best) results would usually all be Reddit posts. I was very pleasantly surprised to do that this time and find a Lemmy post instead!
…It did happen to be a post from me, so unfortunately didn’t answer my question at all, but I still thought it was really neat and wanted to share. Has anyone else seen Lemmy stuff getting indexed and turning up in their search results?
Pretty cool to start seeing Lemmy posts in search results
Gotta keep this up! So much of my google results are Reddit forum posts
At least now I’m starting to see those results as "Fuck /u/Spezz This post removed by "
So many Reddit posts are removed and useless. And often these posts used to be the main answer. I don’t bother much with Redditt anymore. It’s not the knowledgebase it used to be. Will likely never be again.
Some questions I “reask” here on Lemmy and get decent replies. Thus building a new knowledgebase.
That’s exactly what all of us should do.
This could be a big help to growing the overall threadiverse community since growth after the reddit bump has stalled. Not saying growth is intrinsically the goal, but rather that organic rather than force growth (which is how we got most of the users here) is preferable
Hope the indexed instances don’t get taken down years down the road, or have some sort of independent archive to consult later.
You know it’s a unique question when lemmy is on the front page.
Google: I don’t know, ask these nerds.
Take that, Stack Overflow! Programming.dev on deck. Let’s gooooooo
I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a “programming reddit” of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.
The only thing holding it back is probably a setting for showing local communities by default, when logged out browsing. Whenever that feature arrives in Lemmy then 👌
hm. when I test in a private browsing mode it shows Local by default. That doesn’t happen for you?
also:
I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a “programming reddit” of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.
is exactly what I was going for when I created the instance so I’m glad to see others think it could succeed!
Hey, does that mean we’re finally googleable? That’s pretty cool.
My guess is it’ll vary instance by instance. You have to get on Google’s radar to start search your content.
And that happens by people linking to it.
Google Page Rank. I heard of that myth once before.
Time to start injecting my posts with SEO nonsense
Reddit programming funny Google lemmy search results…
Don’t mind me.
Lololol
Lemmception
Please tell me that’s how you got here 😂
lol, I searched for this post title 😛
Quick reminder that Google’s search results are partially impacted by your location, language, device type, search history and cookies.
Source: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/12412910?sjid=12467677493375888160-EU https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/10909618?sjid=12467677493375888160-EU#zippy=%2Chow-to-control-your-search-history
While tree, I just tried in an incognito window and the post was #5
Incognito window
Oh, my sweet summer child.
I know, I know. I nearly added a disclaimer. Point is I’m not OP and I’ve never searched for that kind of thing. At most they know I like lemmy.
So you know those buttons at the top of Google search results?
Images, News, Videos, etc?
You’ll never guess what new button they’re testing out now.
It’s not just reddit. They’re AI assisted buttons with more tabs for commons searches. Many people add “reddit” after a search to find answers specifically on reddit. It’s also catered differently per user so you might see TikTok or Quora as other buttons up top as well.
Google search results will also slightly vary among users.
Huh did Google start indexing lemmy?
Funnily enough my own instance has a such a bad SEO that when I searched up my username (to find out what is out there) I found all other instances my comments got copied to but not my own freaking instance.
Oh well. Yes Google does index instances but how well and often is another story.
Some instances disabled crawling, namely lemmy.ca
But why? Part of why reddit became so useful was its ability to use it for searching. Even though I no longer visit reddit regularly anymore, I still use
site:reddit.comon many of my google searches because it gets better results for opinion or explanation based topics. Similarly, I found tons of useful local info from my local city’s subreddit. I can’t say the same about the Lemmy community, which I only see if I explicitly remember to go to it because the sorting doesn’t show small instances.I… don’t know. Spam protection? Doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s all federated.
You can do site: lemmy.world and find lemmy.ca posts since they’re federated.
appreciateUsefulInfoCallback(true, setVeryLoud);
Maybe google downranks db0 instance like it does other pirate sites?
Sounds like a possibility.
I honestly don’t think Google crawlers knows how to index the fediverse but I am kind of talking out of my ass rn.
Fediverse is just another website. It literally finds my username on many other instances posts got replicated to.
So I thought the biggest issue with Lemmy and Google’s pagerank is that federated content looks a lot like that blogspam that just aggregates content from elsewhere.
Perhaps they’re adapting things
I’ve noticed Lemmy appearing more in search results already. It’s nice
That’s huge! Makes me realize that there’s not really a way for anybody to know that a particular result is from Lemmy/the fediverse by looking at it, especially with the weird TLDs people use. I wonder if Google will eventually start recognizing ActivityPub clients differently?
Your first mistake was unironically using google to search for anything in 2023.
One time I was looking up a question related to obsidian MD, only to find out there was a post about my exact issue, I open it, I’ve already upvoted it. I read closer, it’s my own post from 6mo ago.
Maybe try SearXNG?
https://github.com/searxng/searxng
Or maybe something like https://perplexity.ai to point towards where to look
Heres comes the internet hug of death ;)
Happens to me all the time with my Networking, Fortinet, Ansible, and Cisco subreddits, and that’s exactly why I’m hesitant to purge and delete my account.
That and I haven’t found comparable communities here.
