As per title, I do think this could be a pivoting factor on whether Lemmy (and other federated services) can reach critical mass.
Doing a simple search on major search engines would likely yield a Quora or Reddit result or more on the first page.
It’s critical that Lemmy posts have that same kind of traction to attract a large enough user base.
That’s just my observation.
If you add “lemmy” to the end like you would add for reddit based results you should be able to search just fine. There’s just not enough content or awareness yet to matter.
Perhaps not enough content yet. I’m not getting any positive hits on Bing or Brave search.
One concern about federation is that search engines could potentially (and likely) dilute results because they appear to be coming from different sites and URLs.