DuckDuckSocial
A while ago, Google started displaying relevant tweets whenever you searched for anything, allowing you to see more up-to-date news on whatever you were searching for because Twitter (for a long time) was where news would often drop first, before organizations had time to write articles (or before Google had a chance to index them). Last week, I needed some info about something and couldn’t find it after searching DuckDuckGo and Google, but I did end up finding it in a quick search of my Mastodon instance—someone had blogged about it that same day.
Shortly after that, I built a Firefox extension called DuckDuckSocial (excuse the name, I tried a few and eventually gave up), which uses your Mastodon-compatible fediverse instance (just plug in a developer API key) to append a set of relevant posts to your search results.
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And with mobile support!
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I figured I would try it out for a few days before I published it, but it has helped me several times since then, so here it is.
The two issues right now:
- The pop-in is pretty weird; it takes about 1-2 seconds after a page loads before the instance search results load in. I’m not sure of the best way to handle this or if this is as good as it gets.
- Mastodon’s search is pretty limited, and with me being on a smaller instance, it tends to result in 0 results. Maybe one day, Mastodon will provide some form of ranked search to provide more relevant results, but as it is, it has its limits.
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