Ah, now we have "Toot Search"... "currently searching 500 instances" - no surprise, there: https://www.tootsearch.com/
@OberstKrueger Well, right now it doesn't really work... see my follow-up toot: https://mastodon.social/@danyork/2325668 But yes, I agree it's inevitable.
BUT... when you get the results (I just tried #IPv6 for grins) from Toot Search, you get a *per-instance* list, i.e. all the instances where this hashtag appears.
AND... you can only access those search results IF YOU HAVE AN ACCOUNT ON THAT INSTANCE. Otherwise you are taken to the "/about" page where you can create an account on that system.
AND... the search results I got back for my instance were empty: https://mastodon.social/web/timelines/tag/ipv6 (Is there a time period on the search?)
@danyork this looks more like a boring index to me https://social.infranix.eu/media/dcKL3Ava0UpUl577bdQ
@danyork nice! I assume the captcha images+labels are stored anywhere... do you (does anybody) know if this is a third-party service, or how does this operate? Would be nice to take a closer look at it
@danyork It was inevitable. Anything public online will be crawled, recorded, and made searchable, robots.txt be damned.
At least it seems slow right now, although I'm sure that "problem" will correct itself in time.