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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I use DuckDuckGo on my personal stuff, but my office has the work browser set to Google and Bing still.
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?
Yes, the bangs are a game changer! They even work well on niche sites like Jisho and Scryfall.
Bangs to search Scryfall might actually be a selling point for me. I’ve been experimenting with Kagi, seems like it also supports that as well. This is amazing, thank you for this useful information. :D
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.
My own Whoogle and LibreX instances (the latter can search for free and legal Linux ISOs)
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.
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.
Duck Duck Go too
@SemioticStandard Kagi. I used DDG for a long time, and Kagi is strictly better. Specifically, it’s very snappy and I trust the privacy guarantees even more since I’m a paying customer.
I use Kagi too, it’s surprisingly snappy! Like seriously impressive for a small org. They talk about speed optimisation being critical for them as well. I find the result to be excellent as well. A true Google replacement/feels like Google in its prime.
I believe they have their own index and bot as well?
+1 for Kagi, seems a great value to me, well worth the price to not have any ads, no tracking (leap of faith here) and great search results.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down) without looking for Reddit results all the time.
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit or archive.org versions), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
What plan are you on? Did you adjust your usage behavior to not waste search queries?
Didn’t adjust my usage at all. I used the plan with 1000 searches, but since I work as an IT administrator and literally make searches everyday throughout the day multiple times, I changed to the ultimate plan.
For normal (home / mobile) usage, 1000 searches are more than enough for 2 people.
Google and ChatGPT, I tried DDG several years ago, but the results were not good, might try it again
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.
Mostly duck duck go.
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 is a game changer, especially as I often need to search in specific sources for work. For example,!scholarfor 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).deleted by creator
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.
