I had been having trouble getting meaningful results from the fediverse on Google, and after seeing this post, it seems I’m not the only one. So, I created a site that helps search the fediverse in your search engine of choice (it currently supports Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Dogpile).
Due to query limitations with most search engines, it currently only searches the top 15 lemmy/kbin instances, but I’ve tested it and it seems to provide access to a good chunk of fediverse content. The exception is Google, which should be far more reliable overall as well as providing the ability to search Mastodon and PeerTube.
If you have contributions or ideas for improvement, feel free to check out the project here or shoot me a message. Hope this helps people! :)
Edit: Update in progress including improved search queries and support for Mastodon/PeerTube (Google only, unfortunately)
Edit 2: Update is live, along with a dedicated domain name. If the website doesn’t look any different for you, try Ctrl+F5 or clearing site data - it seems some browsers are caching the old page.
Seems like you could probably use this strategy and get rid of the limits by turning this into an extension that would tack on the site list to the search directly(though, I’m unsure if there are such limits directly via the search box on Google or whomever).
I’d also, just from a code quality perspective, bust the list out into it’s own property (which could later become smarter), and build the query string out at runtime.