DuckDuckGo, Bing, Mojeek, and other search engines are not returning full Reddit results any more.
To be fair, Reddit is no longer that good of a source for answers in the later years.
Quality drop in comments is insane. Sometimes it looks like Quora.
Boozilla@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy’s stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.
hotpot8toe@lemmy.world 3 months ago
tbh I’ve never seen a Lemmy link when searching for stuff. Is it too small to show up? Or do search engines not index Lemmy instances?
Dasnap@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’ve seen it a couple of times when searching on DDG.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
I’ve seen some when I appended “Lemmy” just like “Reddit”. But it relies on lemmy being in the domain name.
Also I assume even when people click on those results, they don’t get ranked much higher because it’s so many different domains while reddit is just one.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You could always add “site:lemmy.world” to your search. I commonly do that, as well as the same for reddit or stack overflow.
infeeeee@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Most of the originalish content on lemmy are linux related stuff, memes and porn. The latter 2 are mostly image/video based, so you don’t search for that very frequently and easily. I can see that in the future it will become a very relevant source of info in linux admin and user circles.
I go back to r*ddit sometimes for some local content which is non existent on lemmy. I see that the tech related subs are mostly dead there, or at least only shadows of their former selfs. E.g. go to r/linux, sort by top all time. In the first 100 results you will barely find anything posted after the exodus.
NotAnotherLemmyUser@lemmy.world 3 months ago
One of the major problems with Lemmy is that many posts get deleted and that nukes the comment section (which is where most of the answers will be).
I wish Lemmy deleted posts closer to how Reddit deletes posts - the post content should be deleted, but leave the comments alone.
Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Searx will show Lemmy results, at least on some Searx instances.
Image
Gerudo@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Twice I have come across links to lemmy, definitely not the norm though.
chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 3 months ago
I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Problem is that we’ll probably need a dedicated search engine for that. As answers are spread in lots of instances, some of them without “lemmy” in the name, I assume.
tea@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Seems like a solvable problem though. We have a list of federated servers inately built into activitypub, right? Just need to tag results from those servers as being linked to a “lemmy” keyword search.
I’m sure I’m oversimplifying it, but all the pieces are there, just need search engines to be smart about how they index. Since there are a couple of federation based models that would be good to index, not just lemmy, it would probably behoove them to figure it out.
xnx@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
Yeah but we need non technical stuff too which i what i hate about the ui and stuff mot trying to be made simpler for non tech people to start using lemmy. I want doctors, lawyers, and casual people asking questions about everyday items and stuff so i can search “best sleep mask lemmy” or any product category and find good discussions. Would also help if lemmy.com was an instance instead of just redirecting to lemm.ee
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I think we have to contribute our hours of UX assistance to see changes there. The brilliant engineers who donate their time probably both focus on working features first and specialize more in technical problem-solving than visual design.
Voyager is quite lovely btw!
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Highly doubtful.
The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:
Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.
I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast “site”. So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than “Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y”.
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 3 months ago
Ephemeral discord servers are awful because they don’t scale and they can only ever help the lowest common denominator of questions/issues. We need something else, but it has yet to present itself as a solution.
butter@midwest.social 3 months ago
Drop a link to a few places people ask tech questions and I will do my part to contribute
communism@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Really for technical answers things should be on a forum. Troubleshooting a linux distro, post on the distro’s forums. Troubleshooting a piece of software, make an issue on its codeberg/github/gitlab/etc. It makes sense that if you’re having an issue with a specific thing you ask for help on a forum dedicated to that thing. I don’t think it’s a positive that things are becoming centralised onto generalised social media, even for more decentralised federated social media like Lemmy. It just makes support for a given piece of software more spread out and harder to find.
Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
The most annoying thing with that is that you need an account for every little forum that you want to post in. But you are still right.
Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
This might be a hot take, but I hope that we as a platform are toxic enough to advertisers so that big tech’s enshittification and advertising never becomes a problem.
capital@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Twitter still has advertisers.
tea@lemmy.today 3 months ago
As I understand it, Lemmy, being FOSS, is pretty immune to this since there are no big tech shareholders to appease. Lemmy is susceptible to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) via something like Threads, however.