I’ve been trying to find any information on this at all without luck. 3rd party search engines like Google and DDG still don’t have much of Lemmy indexed, and the built in search seems to just grab everything whether it matches the search or not. Is there search parameters you can use like Reddit’s “title:” or “flair:”, or some other way to effectively search?
There doesn’t currently seem to be a direct way to go about those search methods, as far as I’m aware.
The closest equivalent I know of to search by title:
Go to the search page of the instance of your choosing (ex. https://lemmy.world/search, or https://lemm.ee/search). Larger instances will tend to be more useful for this since they are more likely to be aware of posts from any arbitrary instance; if you know that you want to search within a particular community, then searching on that community’s instance would yield all possible results, which could potentially not happen with a non-local instance search.
Filter to search only posts. This will yield both posts with the term in the title as well as posts with the search term in their body text.
Use your in-browser Find tool (ctrl+F for Windows, or Command+F for iOS desktop, or other methods with other OSs/devices) to search for the same search term on each page of results to highlight only the posts which have the term in their title.
There is not currently a flair system set in place for Lemmy. One workaround is adding the intended flair to the post title and following the aforementioned method for title search. This only works on posts for which the author has the flair in their post title, which typically is done with parenthesis or brackets before the title proper. I’ve attempted to implement/futureproof this on the [email protected] community for posts that I would want flaired as [MOC].
These filters that you’ve mentioned, as well as others, would be very useful to see on the fediverse in the future.