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 dateuntil: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…
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?
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.