A great use for reddit is the ability to search posts and opinions about any niche topic. Will that be possible with Lemmy as it grows? Will I be able to Google “instant rice Lemmy” and get a comprehensive tier list of each brand?
I imagine search engines will have trouble with all the different instances(?). EDIT: Especially with instances that don’t have Lemmy in their name, I don’t think search engines would return them for Lemmy searches?
If Lemmy becomes a source of enough information like Reddit is, search engines will index it. SEO is a marketing thing, and a place like Lemmy doesn’t really need that. Google, DDG, etc. all put engineering effort into making sure sites with lots of information are indexed and available in their search results.
So I’ve been working on a solution for this.
As I see it Google and others are going to have a hard if not impossible time to incorporate the fediverse, and the fact that the same content can exist on multiple servers.
So I’m working on a search engine specifically build, for Lemmy at least. Where it’ll take you to whatever your preferred instance is when tapping on a search result.
I hope to have a MVP up and running in a few more days.
Can’t emphasize enough how important this is for the growth of Lemmy. Many people I know only access Reddit through google searches.