Show relevant search results

[ghost]

When searching, the available options right now are: new or top of a specific time. Neither of this options usually offers what I'm looking for so I don't use lemmy search because the search engine offers better results. I don't really know how the search engines select the results so I can't provide any suggestions. I guess it's a measure of how many people searching some words click on a post or another.

There should be an option that shows results at least as relevant as the search engines.

This is specially important because of your position regarding not favoring SEO over simple urls, making people unable to search lemmy the way they search reddit, by typing keywords site:reddit.com/r/subreddit in the search engine.

If you need to find a post, don't use search engines or indexers, use lemmy's own search page, which allows you to filter by community if you wish. Its been a concious decision from the beginning to not favor SEO over simple urls: so a comment url (will soon be)

• https://domain.tld/comment/X, not
• https://domain.tld/instance/X/community/X/post/X/comment/X

Originally posted by @dessalines in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/839#issuecomment-1304368786

[dessalines]

When searching, the available options right now are: new or top of a specific time. Neither of this options usually offers what I'm looking for

What are those? Its not popularity, which is what search engines are going to be worse at than our internal search?

I don't really know how the search engines select the results so I can't provide any suggestions...There should be an option that shows results at least as relevant as the search engines.

Search engines are essentially going to show a much worse version of our Top sort, based on page hits rather than explicit user votes.

[ghost]

What are those? Its not popularity, which is what search engines are going to be worse at than our internal search?

The current search options

New | The newest items.
Top | The highest scoring items in the given time frame.

Search engines are essentially going to show a much worse version of our Top sort, based on page hits rather than explicit user votes.

If it was only that what search engines looked at then Lemmy's 'Top' sort would be better. But search engines take into account many things like backlinks, freshness, keyword mentions, user experience, topical authority.

For example it would consider where the keywords appear, in Lemmy they have the same importance if they appear in the title or the content. I think whether the keywords appear together or dispersed is also important.

When I search something I usually don't want to see the posts with most votes. I want to see the posts which main topic are the keywords I'm searching, not just some random posts that mention those keywords.

But soon all search engines will use AI and take into account more parameters than can even be put into an algorithm. Which is why I still think you should lean towards making links easily searchable by search engines instead of trying to make a search that's better or even close to the one from the search engines which I think is a lost battle.

[dessalines]

I want to see the posts which main topic are the keywords I'm searching, not just some random posts that mention those keywords.

What does this mean?

But search engines take into account many things like backlinks, freshness, keyword mentions, user experience, topical authority.

These are all highly manipulated and gamed, SEO is an entire industry of trying to exploit often undefined quirks of the most popular existing search engines. We don't need to play that game, and shouldn't be building software to cater to private corporations and the quirks of their search engines.

I'm mainly just confused about your use case, and what sorting you'd like if its not based on popularity or newness. It needs to be explicit things tho so I can work on actual improvements.