The search function of PieFed is one of the major areas that the PieFed software lags behind the functionality of Lemmy - in nearly every other respect PieFed is ahead of Lemmy, in so many ways even ahead of Reddit itself (I mean in the technical sense), which is really saying something given how Reddit is a multimillion dollar company and PieFed is a handful of people donating software in their free time. (Although of course the goal of Reddit making new "features" has exclusively been to increase their profits, at the expense of the user experience for the vast majority of their user base, sadly 😭)

Note that this situation won't last all that long: PieFed's pace of new feature development is a fantastic and encouraging sight to see, they are so great about it!! (Also, the lagging behind of searching functionality is partly my fault and others who would rather see different features have higher prioritization than that one, which is rarely used in comparison to things like smoother commenting and posting and interacting with notifications that we all do multiple times a day, often many times an hour even.)

Anyway, for searching (and pretty much nothing else) I use Lemmy software rather than PieFed. And to its credit Lemmy's search, which was already pretty fantastic to begin with, recently got a lot better by e.g. allowing you to restrict keywords to post titles only. Note that to use searching you don't need an account on a Lemmy instance - you just pick one and go for it. That said, lemmy.world tends to be very behind in software upgrades - they prioritize stability over new features - but e.g. I know that Discuss.Online has the post title restriction feature, see e.g. this search. Searching using Lemmy is kind of an art, e.g. the default is Top All Time rather than something more commonly useful like New, but you will quickly pick it up.

And I am excited to think how good searching will become on PieFed, when it rolls out. Which I selfishly hope is not soon, because I would still like to see more common user interactions get additional polish first, e.g. it is still the case that sometimes you can get a notification but clicking it does not take you to the space in the post where that conversation was taking place, which is SUPER annoying, whereas searching can always be done by falling back on a Lemmy instance (even though you then have to go through the additional work to find the community on your local PieFed instance - but only if you want to vote or comment - whereas to simply read it you can remain on the Lemmy instance without an account necessary).