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.
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DuckDuckGo, but mostly because of the !bangs. I do 90% of my searches through StartPage (!s), and the rest directly on a few websites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Arch wiki…).
I switched to DDG almost entirely because of the !w bang — Google massively downranking/hiding Wikipedia links made it a lot less useful to me.
What are !bangs and how do I use them?
Take a look at this page.
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.
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.
For me the main thing that makes me stick to DDG is the bangs - adding for example
!wikiin the beginning of a search term to search directly in Wikipedia. It really is a game changer, especially as I often need to search in specific sources for work. `!scholar" for 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).
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.
Google and ChatGPT, I tried DDG several years ago, but the results were not good, might try it again
i use brave search (even if i’m on firefox), it gives good results while having an independent index
duck duck go on firefox.
I’m still looking for a search engine that doesn’t use data from my IP address to provide targeted results. In the meantime, I’ve gone back and forth between using SearXNG instances and using Startpage, but there’s really not a decent search engine in existence, from what I can tell.
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.
Duck Duck Go too
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.
Maybe people mainly search for answers to simple daily life questions or something.
I guess, but it’s still not a search engine and I think it’s a bit problematic if that’s the usecase.
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.
Self-hosted SearXNG. Very easy to self-host, and (for the most part) works just fine
I’m interested in that. Does it take a lot of resources (ram, cpu, disk ) ?
A combination of DDG and Google. DDG’s results too often look like a list of sponsors so when that happens I fuck right back off to Google.
Get an ad blocker, get Privacy Badger, use a VPN, experience the internet the way it was before corporate shitbags got hold of it. Mostly.
I’ve always been underwhelmed with DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and for context on that remark I use Bing as my main search engine.
Is bing actually still just bad? Google just pushes stores for search results when I’m just trying to figure out how shit works so I’m so ready to switch permanently.
Not op, but I used it the other day when I got fed up with google bascally only giving me amazon results when I was looking for something, and yeah it was better (admittedly, it was more like how google used to be, which I view as better). I don’t really think bing is the solution though, can absolutely see them being enshittified shortly if they get enough people to start using bing.
I typically use StartPage, sometimes DDG. Occasionally I pop in and check out how Brave Search is progressing, out of curiosity.
I would love to use Searx, but I’ve never found an instance where functionality wasn’t breaking all the time or it just randomly goes offline. As much as I want to be, I’ve learned that I’m not much of a self-hoster. So, yeah, every time I try Searx, I wind up back at StartPage. If anyone has any solid, reliable instances they know of, I’d love to check them out.
