I was looking for some collection of posts earlier about Proton Mail and the whole controversy with the CEO, and I opened a post the lemmy instance that was suggested was lemmy.zip but the community and the poster were from lemmy.world so that made me ask myself a bunch of questions. Reference link

Note: I used duckduckgo

Here are some questions I have:

  • How does the search engine decide which instance to link you to as you could in theory show every instance for the same post?
  • Could you get a result where all the results are the same post just different instances?
  • Do you think that could deter new people finding out about lemmy through search results?
  • How can an instance make themselves more visible in the search results (for exposure)?
  • I did not get any results from lemmy clients such as vger.app the only results were direct instances, will this always be the case?

I remember learning about search engines a while back but I don’t know how relevant that information is any more. Having crawlers and the more a website is linked in other websites the higher up in the search result will be and the whole robot.txt thing.

I know if I wanted to search for something specific in lemmy I could just use its own search function, but what about people who ask general questions and that happens to be answered in a lemmy post. I wanted to know how exposed we are/ will be to people who don’t yet know about lemmy.

  • gigachadEnglish
    14·
    4 days ago

    Instances that disagree with being found in search engines are not shown. Instance admins can configure their robots.txt by adding lemmy-search. All other instances can theoretically be found. I think their priority depends on the laws of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This probably means that a post on myownlemmy1337 that is federated with lemmy.world, will be found as a post on lemmy.world.

    So, if Lemmy was very famouse, I guess it’s possible to get pages over pages with the same result from different instances. However search engines usually have a way to exclude “similar” results.

    For voyager it may be possible, they do not want to be found, I don’t know about this though. You could add site:vger.app to your search prompt for testing this.