That feeling when you're googling the answer to some technical question, and your own Lemmy post appears 4 results down.
That feeling when you're googling the answer to some technical question, and your own Lemmy post appears 4 results down.
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.
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.
That's my biggest worry, however I've been programming for like 15 years now and there are forums I posted to that no longer exist, so I think its just a symptom of information as a whole.
Reddit was the bastion for this kind if stuff for a long time, and now there are a bunch of posts by this guy named [deleted] that have no post body so make of that what you will
Hey, does that mean we're finally googleable? That's pretty cool.
You know it's a unique question when lemmy is on the front page.
Google: I don't know, ask these nerds.
Lemmception
Please tell me that's how you got here 😂
lol, I searched for this post title 😛
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 👌
I've noticed Lemmy appearing more in search results already. It's nice
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
‘Googling something’, as he enters the most specific question ever.
I get it. Finding the answers to super niche questions is just about the only thing I still go to reddit for.
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
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
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.
I’ve noticed that the quality of the questions and answers on technical topics has gotten noticeably worse since July. Not surprising these types of users would move away from Lemmy first. On the Ubuntu subreddit I’ve noticed a relative increase in confidently incorrect answers.
If it weren't bad for everyone overall, I would support intentionally giving wrong solutions on Reddit. As it is, I simply only go there now for the pre-lemmy knowledge as many do, though as Lemmy starts getting a deeper knowledge base I expect that will slowly change, I find the quality of both the questions and answers on Lemmy to be much greater nine times out of ten.
Ya, it still has a backlog of great answers to questions from the past, but hopefully as new questions are asked and new issues are brought up, Lemmy can grow that backlog as well.
Heres comes the internet hug of death ;)
Programming.dev is a great instance
Yessir
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?
Maybe try SearXNG?
https://github.com/searxng/searxng
Or maybe something like https://perplexity.ai to point towards where to look
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.
That is super neat. Google needs to put a fediverse, lemmy, or mastodon logo beside the result imo
How do I make DDG only returns results from lemmy. Usually you can make it only return results from a specific website (like reddit.com) but you can't do that because of different instances.
That's a problem I notice with Lemmy. You can point search engines at specific instances but not all instances which makes finding content that's only present on Lemmy very difficult.
Yup.
lemmyseems to work okay, but it would miss something like !programming.dev since it doesn't have lemmy in the name.If you know where the community is hosted, you can probably do
site:instanceand get decent results.What we really need is a better integrated search inside lemmy. That way I won't feel the need to use a search engine as often. If that works, perhaps someone could make a single site that tracks all popular communities (just post comment, not comments) for better SEO, and then links to the actual posts. Kind of like those StackOverflow copy sites that I keep running into.
Yay HaxeFlixel
That was one of my main introductions to programming in general
based