Data on search engine market share is available, but I wonder what that looks like for Lemmy users in particular, who I would assume lean more technical than the average user, so probably use DuckDuckGo and alternates more than Google.

I use a mix of DuckDuckGo and Kagi. I’ll also use ChatGPT, which can be good if you’re careful to verify the answers it gives you as a check against hallucinations. It’s useful for short, direct answers without ads or SEO bullshit.

This article on Ars (and if you’re not a subscriber, you absolutely should be, as they are the best tech journalists out there) inspired the question: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/google-admits-reddit-protests-make-it-harder-to-find-helpful-search-results

Fucking Reddit. Enshittification ruins everything.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    I use mostly either ddg or brave search. I miss the google of pre 2010, when the majority of its results were good.

    I also use Yandex whenever I’m looking for pirate stuff, the only engine that doesn’t block those kinds of results.

  • eight_byte@feddit.de
    2·
    2 years ago

    Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.

    • monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      2 years ago

      How do you come by with just 300 searches per month? I tested the trial period and used up the 100 searches in just a couple of days

      • eight_byte@feddit.de
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yes, that limited number of included searches is my only criticism I have with Kagi. They are aware of this, and are trying to offer customers more searches for the same price by improving their costs. I am glad they decided to do this by reducing their costs and have decided to not go the road of monetizing their users by selling ads and customer data.

        However, I try to use Kagi only for serious search requests. For other very trivial searches, I use Startpage. For me, works OK. But I hope that one day Kagi offers enough searches, so I can just use it everywhere as my default search engine without having to thinking about it.

  • Kir@feddit.it
    2·
    2 years ago

    I don’t understand why lots of you answer with chatGPT. It’s not a search engine! And you shouldn’t use it like a search engine.

    • Ix9@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Same here. I know a lot of folks don’t like the results, but to be honest, I don’t find Google any better these days.

  • kamen@beehaw.org
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.

    • Keesrif@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      I was in this camp but find that the results I’ve gotten from DDG have been notably worse for the last year or so, to the point that I don’t expect useful results to come out of it any more at this point. Even if I searched “site name” because I couldn’t remember the URL was spelled “site-name.com” I’ve had no results coming from DDG, while Google had it as the first hit.

      Have you experienced something similar? Are there techniques or workarounds I’m not aware of?

      • kamen@beehaw.org
        1·
        2 years ago

        Sadly, yes, and instances like this have me falling back to Google. I’d happily try something else, but I’m a bit at a loss right now. What would you suggest as another search engine to try?

  • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    DuckDuckGo. Its results are much better than Google’s in my experience. Whenever I Google something, all I get is a list of online stores I’ve never heard of, and they have nothing to do with my search input.

    • sab@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      For me the main thing that makes me stick to DDG is the bangs - adding for example !wiki in the beginning of a search term to search directly in Wikipedia. It is a game changer, especially as I often need to search in specific sources for work. For example, !scholar for direct access to Google Scholar is great.

      Whenever I think Google will provide better results it’s as easy as !g - but I am also experiencing that the results are increasingly unhelpful (often geared towards shopping rather than information).

  • xusontha@l.buckodr.ink
    1·
    2 years ago

    I use Ecosia. It works quite well, and if I ever need to search something on Google instead (like a coin flip/stock ticker) you can just do #g or #yt for Youtube They also plant trees and are carbon negative

  • Midou@kbin.projectsegfau.lt
    1·
    2 years ago

    SearXNG, searches every search engine and regroups them in a single list, alongside the very powerful “bang” variant they use (“!!” is like “!” for ddg, and “!” is to only search with this search engine, “:en” is to choose a specific shortcode language.)