Is there a way to #search all of the Fediverse for specific key words instead of just searching #Hashtags? #MastodonUpdate #Qt
I think there really should be an option. #BottleNeck
Unfortunately that runs into a complication of running a federated system.
It runs into real engineering and scalability problems since it requires more and more processing power and network traffic to transmit all of that data to all of the different databases that would be required to be maintained to do such searches.
It's a feature that a lot of people want, but it's one that would be very expensive to implement, so it's a tall order.
It's just a cost of trying to set up a system that is federated instead of completely centralized where there would just be one database.
@volkris couldn't this work by publishing post/pages to Google and use googles search function to search and return the output to Mastodon, or is this a problem with protocol? I wonder if all the data could be compressed and searched.
Well perhaps, and I have seen articles saying that Google is aware of this task and is thinking about how to contribute to it.
But one does not really publish TO Google. Instead Google finds content that it wants to index.
You can run into issues with sort of compatibility where different instances will display the same content so Google might be cataloging the same content on different domains, which throws a wrench into it.
I would say in general yes, Google is an option, kind of an external viewer cataloging things. But internal to the platform it gets even harder
