FediSearch — Easily Search the Fediverse
programmer2514.github.io
Easily search the fediverse in your preferred search engine

I had been having trouble getting meaningful results from the fediverse on Google, and after seeing this post, it seems I’m not the only one. So, I created a site that helps search the fediverse in your search engine of choice (it currently supports Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Dogpile).

Due to query limitations with most search engines, it currently only searches the top 15 lemmy/kbin instances, but I’ve tested it and it seems to provide access to a good chunk of fediverse content. The exception is Google, which should be far more reliable overall as well as providing the ability to search Mastodon and PeerTube.

If you have contributions or ideas for improvement, feel free to check out the project here or shoot me a message. Hope this helps people! :)

https://fedi-search.com/

Edit: Update in progress including improved search queries and support for Mastodon/PeerTube (Google only, unfortunately)

Edit 2: Update is live, along with a dedicated domain name. If the website doesn’t look any different for you, try Ctrl+F5 or clearing site data - it seems some browsers are caching the old page.

  • tal@kbin.social
    19·
    1 year ago

    In all seriousness, Google needs to get on providing an easier way to specify that a search should hit the Fediverse. site:reddit.com works for Reddit, but there is presently no analogous operator on Google’s search for a distributed system that spans many domains.

    I mean, it’s great that you’ve made this, don’t get me wrong, but they really should do that as well.

    • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      but there is presently no analogous operator on Google’s search for a distributed system that spans many domains.

      Because that’s just a basic search. A search engine searches across multiple domains by default. If you’re specifically looking for only results from ActivityPub enabled services, that’s pretty much an impossibility since there’s no way to know (from a web crawl) if a page is served by a server that supports ActivityPub. Another problem is that a lot of fediverse instances purposefully block search engine crawlers because they don’t want to appear in search results.

    • Polymath@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      I like the idea of scrapping Google altogether, and just having “better” search engines here that account for federated decouplings/distributions

      Not entirely the same, but I switched over to Presearch a year or so ago, just to get away from Google and the “big tech” corporations