A couple days ago I updated https://search-lemmy.com/ to 0.4.0.

New features, that several people were asking for:

  • The UI has been overhauled and it should be much easier to find your home instance now.
  • Search itself has been overhauled. Increase search performance significantly. I also automatically search for related terms as well. You may now see fewer search results, but ideally they should be more relevant. You can also now include basic syntax like:
    • quotes: “some terms that must be together”
    • negative terms: cat -dog (shows posts about cats that don’t mention dogs)
    • either or: cat OR dog (shows posts about either cats or dogs). The default search behavior is now an implicit AND, but order doesn’t matter.
  • I’ve added several new filters that you can use including:
    • !safeoff – Disables safe search allowing NSFW posts to appear in the search results (NSFW is now hidden by default)
    • since:YYYY-MM-DD – shows only posts that have occurred since the specified date
    • until:YYYY-MM-DD – same as above but in reverse. It will only posts up to the given date.
  • I’ve removed the preferred-instance query parameter from the results URL so it should be easier to share links to search results now.
  • The date the post was created or last updated is now displayed in the search results.

Bug Fixes:

  • Site performance should now be stable. Fixed a bug related to the database pool that was causing the site to hang.
  • Fixed a bug that would cause broken links.
  • Fixed various bugs with the crawler causing posts to be missed.

Known Issues:

  • If you set your home-instance to a fairly small instance, the number of search results is also relatively small. Once (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3259) is resolved. I should be able to show links regardless of what your home instance is set to, allowing you to search the entire Fediverse.
  • Currently searching only looks at the post title and body. Comments aren’t indexed either. This also is dependent on the above issue on Lemmy itself.

Finally some things to note:

I’ve started to refactor the code to abstract away Lemmy from the actual search engine. As I now start to prepare to search other Fediverse instances like Kbin, and maybe even Mastodon, etc…

    • milesEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      cleared cache, your url still gives me no results. in the top right the dropdown as “Ice Orchid”. I’m not sure what that is

      • @marsara9OPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Here’s the landing page if you just go to https://www.search-lemmy.com/. I’m assuming that drop-down that you’re referring to is your home instance selector. Since you’re on lemmy.world I suggest you set that to well, lemmy.world. Then you can do your search and all of the results will take you directly to that post on lemmy.world (or whatever you set as your home instance).

        Now you can also see that Find Communities button in the top right, you can click on it and it’ll take you to a similar page but instead of returning posts for search results, it will return a list of communities, based on how many matches it found. (as if you did a search on the normal page but instead just counted the number of results per community).

        • milesEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          why make users set a home instance? i can see a list of communities local to lemmy.world at https://lemmy.world/communities in the [Local] tab, and i can search my home instance at https://lemmy.world/search. i figured a search engine would span instances so users could find things across the lemmy-verse?

          • @marsara9OPEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Eventually it will. But there’s a bug preventing global search working in lemmy itself. You can see more of the details here (https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/20 )

            One of my primary goals with this is that users MUST be able to open a given link in their home instance so that they can then interact / reply / subscribe, etc… without having to figure out how to find said post themselves. So with that requirement, users MUST select a home instance but because of the before-mentioned bug I can’t show posts that your instance isn’t aware of.