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 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.
Except it IS a search engine and that’s basically all it’s good for. By its very nature all it can do is collate information. It’s the only thing AI is good at.
No it’s not. To search is a specific task, and generative AI can’t do that. It can fulfill some need that we are used to fulfill by searching the web, but this doesn’t mean it’s a search engine.
If you lost the key of your car and have access to an AI that can (sometimes) start your can without a key, you can be happy about it, but you still can’t say the AI searched the key for you. It can’t do it.
Edit: btw, we are talking about generative AI here. I’m not saying there isn’t and could not be a search engine that use AI to better its result.
You sound like you’re desperately trying to play a losing semantic game.
https://blogs.bing.com/search/march_2023/Confirmed-the-new-Bing-runs-on-OpenAI%E2%80%99s-GPT-4
Fuck off.
That’s quite the escalation. This is a reminder to be nice on this instance.
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.
Mostly duck duck go.
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.
I run my own searx instance
As someone who’s only recently heard of SearXNG, why searx and not SearXNG?
Self-hosted Searxng. It’s shared to multiple people which kills a lot of the usefulness in Google or others trying to track my instance.
I tried this, but it kept saying ‘Engine failed’ or something on every other search. I never could figure out why. I might try again
Edit: Actually it was Searx I used. I’ll spin up Searxng and see if it’s improved
I had some issues with searx… Things are a bit better in my experience with searxng. Sometimes I still run into the error messages. But usually it’s my fault more than anything (server bogged down, too many requests/searches across all my users, or internet blips)… I just rerun the search a few seconds later and it’s usually good again.
Currently down for updates, but does a great job of avoiding SEO abuse/blog spam/etc. Takes you back to the earlier days of the internet when it felt like there were more forums/individual sites/etc. They’re still out there, just hidden under all the junk.
Thanks I look forward to trying this.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.
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?
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?
Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.
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
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.
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn’t cutting it.
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Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven’t missed it a bit.
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Thanks for making me aware of Kagi, I’ve been trialing it and getting decent results is a breath of fresh air in a world of blogspam and LLM garbage.
Google, duck duck go when I don’t want to see ads for days based on what I’m searching, Bing and Perplexity when I want to avoid doing a series of searches to learn something.
DuckDuckGo for me personally.
