The UI has been overhauled and it should be much easier to find your home instance now.
Search itself has been overhauled. Increase search performance significantly. I also automatically search for related terms as well. You may now see fewer search results, but ideally they should be more relevant. You can also now include basic syntax like:
- quotes: "some terms that must be together"
- negative terms: cat -dog (shows posts about cats that don't mention dogs)
- either or: cat OR dog (shows posts about either cats or dogs). The default search behavior is now an implicit AND, but order doesn't matter.
I've added several new filters that you can use including:
- !safeoff -- Disables safe search allowing NSFW posts to appear in the search results (NSFW is now hidden by default)
- since:YYYY-MM-DD -- shows only posts that have occurred since the specified date
- until:YYYY-MM-DD -- same as above but in reverse. It will only posts up to the given date.
I've removed the preferred-instance query parameter from the results URL so it should be easier to share links to search results now.
The date the post was created or last updated is now displayed in the search results.

Bug Fixes:

Site performance should now be stable. Fixed a bug related to the database pool that was causing the site to hang.
Fixed a bug that would cause broken links.
Fixed various bugs with the crawler causing posts to be missed.

Known Issues:

If you set your home-instance to a fairly small instance, the number of search results is also relatively small. Once (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3259) is resolved. I should be able to show links regardless of what your home instance is set to, allowing you to search the entire Fediverse.
Currently searching only looks at the post title and body. Comments aren't indexed either. This also is dependent on the above issue on Lemmy itself.

Finally some things to note:

I've started to refactor the code to abstract away Lemmy from the actual search engine. As I now start to prepare to search other Fediverse instances like Kbin, and maybe even Mastodon, etc...

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[–] lchapman@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What about it I want to find the most populated community for a given search term, across the lemmiverse?

[–] marsara9@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Currently you can just search for posts. I don't track anything like the number of members in a community etc.. just the content of the post and how more or less accurate they are to your current query. I'm continuously trying to improve the page rankings though.

I guess in theory you can perform the same search multiple times with different community:!some_community@some_instance filters to see which returns the most results, but ya, that wouldn't be the most convenient. At the moment this tool though is about finding posts, but who knows what features I may add in the future.

[–] lchapman@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds good, figured it couldn’t hurt to ask

[–] marsara9@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I've been seeing a few people ask for something like this recently, so I might try and see how hard it would be to build something to help find active communities.

[–] HangingFruit@czech-lemmy.eu 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you should use Lemmy explorer for this.

[–] lchapman@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks, good calln