I’ve had real issues trying to search the fediverse. I’ve had bad luck with the search function of both Lemmy and Mbin, and while https://fedi-search.com/ exists the Whoogle server is down and either way the search just seems to be a list of various fediverse instances and nothing fancier (which also means that it’s not a complete search?). Other than that it’s quite the hassle to list all the instances you’d like to search for every search. What’s the best way to search the fediverse? What works for you? And is it somehow possible to add a shortcut to e.g., DDG that searches specific sites without having to type for example site:lemmy.dbzer0.com and all the other instances all the time?
Since I already pay for Kagi, I use their “Fediverse Forums” lens.
Kagi has definitely been on my radar, but it sounds a bit weird (for lack of a better word) to pay for search. I’ve never even thought about it. Maybe it’s worth it…
Most searxng instances have a similar lens for lemmy comments so you can do that too if you want an open source alternative.
Thanks, I definitely prefer this alternative. How does searxng work in general?
It is a meta-search engine so it takes results from other search engines and shows the results. Usually you can decide which search engines to use in preferences. You can host it yourself or find an online instance to use.
It seems really great actually. Thanks for the rec. Might selfhost it. But I also get the argument of Kagi if one doesn’t want to rely on the search results of Google/Bing/DDG or whatever. Even if I definitely prefer FOSS.
Kagi doesn’t really have its own index either. It mainly relies on other search engines as well and the indexes that are its own that focus on small web stuff is better done by marginalia.nu which is also open source.
Yeah, I was resistant to it for a while. I used the free version until I found I was running out of queries, then I got the cheap plan, and by the time they announced the $10 plan was going unlimited it seemed like a great deal. And I don’t have to worry about Kagi trying to break my ad blocker because there are no ads to be blocked.
Ive been coming around too. Can someone give good reasons to switch or any other killer features?
A big one for me is that you can tweak the priority of specific domains. in my case I hate Fandom but I don’t want to block it entirely, so I lower it and raise the other wikis I’d rather see first. I also have every Pinterest domain blocked, which would be very tedious to do with search engine operators.
neat! didn’t know this was a thing
I’ve had bad luck with the search function of both Lemmy and Mbin
What were you searching for? I found a few results using that
site:lemmy.dbzer0.com and all the other instances all the time
You can probably just use one large instance after the “site:”. If an instance is large and old enough (and I think dbzer0 definitely is), it would have all the valuable content available elsewhere.