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…

    • @marsara9@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      This doesn’t change the behavior of the built-in search within Lemmy. But rather this is suppose to be a close approximation of using Google with adding reddit to the end of your query.

      The problem with the fediverse is that there are so many different instances you can’t really include them all in a search query and even if you could the links that Google would provide wouldn’t necessarily go to YOUR instance. This aims to fix that.