I’m curious as to why Lemmy rarely shows up in search results on the main internet even if there is a post related to the search input. I’ve only ever seen a Lemmy result if Lemmy is specified. Is this because we’re still relatively small or some other reason?

  • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    11 days ago

    Not much links to it. It’s really rare that I see a blog, social media, or non-fediverse forum post link to a Lemmy post. That sort of thing still matters quite a bit to search engines.

  • m_f@discuss.onlineEnglish
    6·
    11 days ago

    I’ve seen my own posts show up in specific search results based on the transcripts, which is nice to see. Tried searching for “Great Scott! The hatch is opening” on Google just now and it linked to my post at https://discuss.online/post/14315116. That’s probably a bit of an issue actually. The link is for lemmy.dbzer0.com for my user on midwest.social to a community on lemmy.world and I just linked to it from discuss.online. Those might each be ranked independently even though it’s the same content, vs all being ranked together if it’s all centralized on one site like Reddit. Not really that hard to adjust for, but if Google doesn’t care in the first place because they think they’ll get fewer ad impressions out of it then it won’t be changed.

    Kagi has a feature for specifically searching the fediverse. It’s a paid search engine, but IMO that ends up with their incentives aligned with mine.

  • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
    5·
    11 days ago

    Is this because we’re still relatively small or some other reason?

    Pretty much, yeah. Incredibly.

  • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    11 days ago

    There’s just not enough content here besides tech and linux. Also, It’s likely about keeping the internet influence dynamics inside the silicon valley, which in part is favorable to authoritarian surveillance system like the US. And yes, they are in bed with each other if you haven’t noticed.

  • Auth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 days ago

    I’ve seen league of linux lemmy show up in search results but thats dead now so rip. Other than that we dont have that many answer style threads compared with the years and years of blogspam and reddit spam.

  • sndmn@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    Because that doesn’t make any money for Google/MS/Meta/Amazon etc.

    • simple@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      11 days ago

      …No. It’s because Lemmy content and users are duplicated into hundreds of instances. Websites are ranked independently and because they’re so split, none of them are popular enough to be on search engines. There are plenty of ad-free sites that show up on page one.

      some speculate that because the content is the same across all these instances, Lemmy might be getting caught in the spam filter too.