I was just thinking about this, when I’m facing an issue, the first thing I do is go to a search engine and usually there’s a Reddit post. But I don’t want to ask there. And the only way we’re going to build up the info for folks to find us and come here is for us to just start asking here. On the Fediverse. We need to build up that mountain of knowledge that Reddit has and will always have. So we should be championing ANYONE asking questions here. Even if we think it’s obvious and we think you can just Google it. There was a time where you literally couldn’t just Google it. That was built over time. We need to build that here. So start asking your questions here! Find the answers and then post your answer to your own question. Or let someone do it for you. We need to build the knowledge here to be found. It’s not just about people looking for alternatives. We need our knowledge to be more valuable than their knowledge.
Kagi has a search lens for Fediverse forums like Lemmy. More content in Lemmy will make that even better
Just to save people a rabbithole.
Kagi is pretty cool. But it’s not free. And for most people who don’t have much disposable income it’s not really a justifiable expense to pay for a search engine.
Of course if one truly can’t afford it, paying for search can seem a luxury.
However I would argue as a counterpoint; If there’s any online service one would consider paying for, it should be search. Search is most literally our “front page to the internet”. It’s our first stop in any quest for information. Even the founders of Google knew early on, that putting adds in search creates a perverse incentive against the best results, favoring instead worse results, so people perform more searches, creating more opportunities to show people adds.
$5 a month isn’t much to know your query will give the results you want, instead of the results advertisers want.
I wish yacy was better. Federated/self hosted search should be awesome.
Would you prefer something limited to searching federated content, or something closer to yacy where it crawls normal websites too?