I’m reaching out to the community to gather your thoughts and suggestions on how we can enhance Lemmy’s search functionality, as discussed in Issue #846. Currently, the search options (new or top of a specific time) do not consistently deliver relevant or useful results, which creates difficulties for users trying to find posts based on specific keywords. While search engines like Google employ factors such as backlinks, freshness, keyword mentions, user experience, and topical authority, we need to strike a balance between improving search results and maintaining low complexity.
Please consider leaving a thumbs up on the GitHub issue.
The main issue is that currently searching hits the database hard, and database load is already the main bottleneck for Lemmy performance.
I think there need to be backend changes first, such as support for Meilisearch or similar before search options can be extended.