I was wondering if the search engines are indexing the fediverse. Because recently Google search became so bad so I was always putting Reddit at the end to get some not so generic results and I haven’t even noticed to get any replies pointing to the fediverse ever. So I was wondering if search engines were actually indexing the content here?
Yes, but keep in mind top level domains like .world .ai .life and similar are heavily punished by the search algorithm.
So let’s say you search for “best Android apps 2023” and there’s a Lemmy.world post with this exact title and a great list of apps, versus a clickbait techblog written by ChatGPT and a .com domain… The techblog will very likely be ranked higher.
One good thing about Reddit is that one could add a “site:reddit.com” at the end of each Google search to improve the results.
This won’t work as well with Lemmy (since it’s all a bunch of different domains). Hope that in the future a feature like this is implemented to search across the fediverse
Yeah, perhaps another qualifier that’s, say, specifies the protocol, e.g. Activity Pub? Would be handy