As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.
I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.
Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.
Haven’t seen it mentioned yet, so I’ll add that you can narrow down your search a little with a site qualifier. So you can search “diy table instructions site:reddit.com” to specifically limit results to reddit only (or any site). I’ve personally also found a lot of use by using the same method within a subreddit, “diy table instructions site:reddit.com/r/woodworking”
There’s a lot of good tips at this link. Although it’s an old page, so I dunno if they all work still, ymmv. https://www.ou.edu/webhelp/general/tutorials/google/
I agree with some other posters that hopefully lemmy can grow to fill the boots that reddit is stumbling out of. Although with so many different instances, with different url’s, it seems less straight forward.
I think search engines are going to need a way to understand the fediverse in a deeper way than just the URLs. I don’t know what it would look like exactly, but at least provide some context for the network that this link belongs to.
One method I was considering would be for a search engine to run an instance of each fediverse protocol and index the fediverse that way.
Then the result would take you via the search engine’s instance, and from there you could navigate to the native instance or your home instance using the ! links or whatever. Maybe the search results could offer you multiple links for however you wanted to access it, but the search instance would allow the fediverse links to appear in a common unified way. If you were searching via duckduckgo you’d go to the lemmy.duckduckgo.com domain.
Incidentally if an instance wanted to opt out of search results it’d be as simple as defederating from the search instance.