Neither DuckDuckGo nor Google are particularly good at it, since you can’t do something like site:reddit.com
. How do you guye search or is this just an unsolved problem?
The built-in search feature is actually quite decent I find, is it not working well for you?
I find it decent for finding communities. I’ve never found a way to search actual content, either.
Perhaps I’ve missed a trick, it only searches for communities. I’m using Jerboa, the ‘official’ app.
There’s no way to search for individual posts or comments.
Should work just fine for posts and comments as well, for example, here’s a search result containing your comment
I’m being dim. This type of query can’t cover instances that lemmee, in this case, isn’t subscribed to, can it?
That’s true, it will only show content which has been federated to lemm.ee, so indeed if you want to search for more content than is available on your instance, you would need some additional tools for that.
That’s what I thought, phew!
Global searches for things is how I discovered subreddits that are my topic of interest but are called - for me anyway - unusual names! I can’t expect any one instance to carry all of Lemmy so I was asking about a search engine.
That said, your search method is probably much better than what I’m doing now! Thank-you.
Try this and see if it works for you.
Example result when using a random SearxNG instance from the list : https://searx.space/
And the built-in search on Lemmy is usually rather fine for me.
You can self-host Lemmy-Search, it’s probably the best option right now. Unfortunately their official instance is down, what a shame that no one else is hosting a public instance.
Google smacks your SEO rating if you have the same content as other websites. The fediverse will face this problem for a while until search engines find a solution to it.
The default web UI search utils are very strong though. If you know content is on Lemmy, you can search by post type/author/instance/etc and find it quite fast.