One of the great joys of working on a search engine is that you get to reverse engineer SEO spam, and overall study how it evolves over time.
I’ve been noticing the search engine spam strategy of adding ‘reddit’ to page titles for a few years now, but it feels like it’s been growing a lot recently. I don’t think it’s actually working, but it’s so cute that they are trying.
This is how we found anything on reddit for most of its useful life. Its search was always garbage so we relied on Google to come up with usable results.
Nah. The best option we have imo is a service that indexes everything on one site so traditional search engines can find it. That requires someone to build it, and AFAIK that’s hasn’t happened.
That or the search engines themselves implement their own fediverse instances just for the purposes of generating results. At a certain point if the platform becomes relevant enough I think we could see that happen.
I think they’d probably prefer instances that they have control over to reduce the avenues for a third party to manipulate the results. Otherwise they have to trust whoever runs the search instances.
Here’s a tip:
site:reddit.comOkay but reddit is also becoming inaccessible; how to migrate this data?
Or do this:
-site:reddit.com
Makes me sad to think that this will soon be about as useful as “site:facebook.com” with the way Reddit is going.
Yeah maybe giving corpo trash exclusivity over the sum total of human knowledge wasnt the best idea?
Do you think it will ever be possible to do that for all the Lemmy instances?
Lemmy’s built-in search barely works as it is, so unless some drastic changes happen it’s resounding no.
It’s miles better than reddit’s search has ever been.
This is how we found anything on reddit for most of its useful life. Its search was always garbage so we relied on Google to come up with usable results.
Web search engines don’t rely on sites’ built-in search features.
Nah. The best option we have imo is a service that indexes everything on one site so traditional search engines can find it. That requires someone to build it, and AFAIK that’s hasn’t happened.
That or the search engines themselves implement their own fediverse instances just for the purposes of generating results. At a certain point if the platform becomes relevant enough I think we could see that happen.
I think they’d probably prefer instances that they have control over to reduce the avenues for a third party to manipulate the results. Otherwise they have to trust whoever runs the search instances.
Pretty much all content gets federated to lemmy.world so if you use site:lemmy.world that’ll do it.
If you look for something related to piracy, sadly it won’t show.
It already works pretty well if you just add Lemmy to the search.
Kagi.com has a lens for the fediverse. A lens is basically a scope within which performing the search.