Kagi has an option to search the Fediverse. This makes it a lot easier than specifying a site in the search query, which would also limit the results to a specific instance.
Why YSK: This lets you easily replace searches like “some topic reddit” with Lemmy!
Is that subscription based search engine that everyone talks about ?
Yes. Its 10 bucks a month though for it to be useful. There is a 5 bucks plan but its limited to only 300 searches.
So… what’s the difference from other free search engine?
https://fedi-search.com/ allows more than kagi :)
That and I’m not paying for yet another search engine aggregator (solves nothing SearX can’t do for free) hosted in the USA that’s pro AI slop.
They seem to do quite a bit of indexing themselves. A good alternative that’s from Europe would be Qwant, but they don’t have a feature for searching the fediverse. It would be nice if it got added to fedi-search :)
Qwant and Ecosia are building a search index, but I don’t think there is anything that can really compete with Google and Bing at the moment: https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/
The idea of searching had me thinking that it would be nice to have a search-focused instance that didn’t defederate from any sites (besides the illegal stuff) and auto-subscribes to every new community so it has all the information possible. Then you could do “foo bar site:searchlemmy.com” and get an effect similar to reddit
Although that’s probably unnecessary. But would be kind of cool
I like lemm.ee is as close as you can get. AFAIK it’s federated with pretty much everyone and it’s got a very large userbase so nearly every conmunity is federated.
Wait, a large userbase is required for an instance to federate with every community? I thought you could host a single user instance but still be federated with everything that you don’t explicitly block.
Remote communities don’t federate until a user subscribed to them. There is this tool to automate it however.
When you create a new community, it will only be available to your instance. To make it accessible to other instances, at least one user from each remote instance must follow it.
This tool automates this process by following your community from all remote instances until it gains at least one real-user follower.
A community is only federated if someone on your instance subscribes to it.