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.

  • xusontha@l.buckodr.ink
    1·
    1 year 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

  • eight_byte@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

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

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year 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.

  • Midou@kbin.projectsegfau.lt
    1·
    1 year 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.)

  • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.comEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.