I was looking for some collection of posts earlier about Proton Mail and the whole controversy with the CEO, and I opened a post the lemmy instance that was suggested was lemmy.zip but the community and the poster were from lemmy.world so that made me ask myself a bunch of questions. Reference link

Note: I used duckduckgo

Here are some questions I have:

  • How does the search engine decide which instance to link you to as you could in theory show every instance for the same post?
  • Could you get a result where all the results are the same post just different instances?
  • Do you think that could deter new people finding out about lemmy through search results?
  • How can an instance make themselves more visible in the search results (for exposure)?
  • I did not get any results from lemmy clients such as vger.app the only results were direct instances, will this always be the case?

I remember learning about search engines a while back but I don’t know how relevant that information is any more. Having crawlers and the more a website is linked in other websites the higher up in the search result will be and the whole robot.txt thing.

I know if I wanted to search for something specific in lemmy I could just use its own search function, but what about people who ask general questions and that happens to be answered in a lemmy post. I wanted to know how exposed we are/ will be to people who don’t yet know about lemmy.

  • 🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    So domains are recursive tree structures. So u have node com which has a bunch of nodes below it of different domains which can have sub domains etc. Its like this cos that’s how DNS was designed.

    Search engines gives scores to domains and pages. When u say that the content origin of ur page is some other domain the search engines will use that knowledge to adjust rating accordingly.

    Say u have 2 domains site1.example.com and site2.example.com the search engine will have a rank for site1, site2, and example.com where the rating of both site1 and site2 effect the rating for example.com.

    If the content origin for all federated content has the same origin say instance.fediverse.com then the rating for all federated content will be classified as part of fediverse.com and all content will be working together across all instances boosting the fediverse as a single entity.

    • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Thank you for teaching me a bit! Ya know, I bet my computer science classes taught me this at some point. I should pay more attention to my readings lol