Google searched worked really well for reddit if trying to find an answer to a technical question or the like. How well will this translate for Lemmy? I assume it would be a lot more difficult as the post could reside on any number of smaller instances.
Since all posts/comments are public, all you need is some kind of indexer to organize them and a list of all the instances. There are people working on it right now. But in the meantime you can just add
(intext:"modlog" & "instances" & "docs" & "code" & "join lemmy")to your search queries to search all Lemmy instances.lemmy-ui dynamically populates content from a JSON fetch in Javascript, so I expect it will be poor for search engines. In both Chrome and FIrefox on desktop, I can’t even save a post or comments with the normal browser ‘save’ feature.
They are very low in the search rank but I have noticed that when I search lemmy specific topics I do get “posts” from various instances in the results.
So it seems they can be indexed at least by google but I think the project could benefit from some SEO work to help community discovery from search.
