How can I search lemmy for answers similar to how in 2019 you could google search "[problem] + reddit"?

I mean, "[problem] + Lemmy" works

Actually put Lemmy in quotes and it'll return better results

Ok that actually kinda works indeed, nice😄

Generically, with site:programming.dev, replace with your own instance.

But it assumes two things:

That the instance is indexed by google.
That the answer is actually there.

You may need to try a different instance for 1, but 2 is not really solvable.

But what about all instances?

2 is solvable if this search is possible.

What brought me to make this post was how do I simply find the answer to "best lemmy app android"?

I know how to find the answer but it would be nice to search all lemmy instances with such generic questions.

Is there a possibility of site:instance1|instance2|instance3 or similar? Maybe site:*lemmy* [question at hand]

Obviously that's pseudocode but I hope it helps understand what I'm asking.

If at all possible if you could run this in incognito container it would be even better. You never know if a blocked user posted something valuable lol
- You might try searxng, though due to the way federation works, that's not really necessary. All you need to do is search one of the more federated instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemmy.sdf.org and you will pull up anything that server has seen related to your search. User blocks aren't really an issue, since you don't need to be logged in. The only time searching multiple instances would be helpful is if you know the post originally might have come from an instance that doesn't widely federate or is heavily blocked from federation.
  
  Also I've seen quite a few folks from lemmy.ca so you might try your instance's own search. It will usually search federated content as well as local content.
  
  The main issue though is like @CameronDev@programming.dev suggested. Lemmy is young, it doesn't have nearly 20 years of back archives that you can search nor the huge user base that Reddit had to create such a rich back archive. It's getting there, but it is a problem only time and usage of Lemmy will solve.
  
  As for the best Lemmy app, You might give Voyager a go. I use it on iOS and have been quite happy with it.
- rust (site:programming.dev | site:lemmy.world)
  
  That seemed to work, I guess you could keep appending instances?
  
  Its just google, so no user specific impact.
- Here is my attempt in a separate post:
  
  https://mander.xyz/post/7198692
  
  I feel like though if you put too much site filters, results might be reduced in an unexpected way (like searching "X" thing on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml might produce fewer results than searching "X" on lemmy.world only)
- Your instance holds a copy of the information, so just use your instance url. Unless your instance is down, in which case you should not use your instance url

The biggest impediment to using lemmy as a less shitty SO/Reddit is that there simply isn't the volume of answers here. Eventually there may be - and I'd argue that the quality of answer is generally better here - but currently there are a lot of questions that simply haven't been asked.

The meme about googling site:Reddit comes out of how deeply shitty Google has let their search engine become. In an ideal world you'd just search on Google and get decent quality responses instead of needing to domain bind your results.

Maybe it'd be helpful to try a quality search engine like Kagi?

The meme about googling site:Reddit comes out of how deeply shitty Google has let their search engine become.

It was two-part, the other side was that reddit's own search was so crap people use google search instead.
I feel like when the volume of answers does get to the point of usefulness it'll be infected by the same corporate trash that took over Reddit.

There is This which indexes a couple of different sites

Kagi has a "lense" for Fediverse forums, which is a pretty great solution. Maybe adding Lemmy will work if it finds everything mirrored on lemmy.world, I'm not sure. Kagi finds everything on the original instance.

I really like Kagi, I've exhausted my free searches.

Sincerely hope they find another model so that they can offer a cheaper plan, the payment system is one thing hindering them IIRC.

Oh, well I just need to get rich I guess.
- I agree. I'm happy to pay, but not for AI search functionality, and not as much as they're asking.