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.
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.
Why do you have to answer like that?
You are linking a search engine based on generative AI, which is a different things than using chatgpt per sè and, as I was saying to another user, I did not know existed.
If you don’t like my answer you can simply not comment on that. I don’t care if you agree with me or not, be polite
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.
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.
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.
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’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?
i used to use ddg, but i switched to brave search (even on firefox) as the results are surprisingly good despite the fact that they use their own index. It also supports bangs btw, if you used to use those on duckduckgo.
If i had rank search engines it’d be:
- brave search - own index
- startpage - uses google’s index
- duckduckgo - mostly bing, but crawls from many other indexes as well
- swisscows - uses mostly bing as well afaik
If you disable javascript, 1-3 work mostly fine, on startpage you lose the extra info banners and just get results, duckduckgo’s interface looks a bit less fancy but it works the same, and brave search works & looks exactly the same but you lose the brave ai integration at the top, however the regular info banners still appear on the right. Swisscows doesn’t load without JS.
I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search
Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven’t missed it a bit.
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’ve been using DuckDuckGo since, at least 2010, maybe earlier. If its results aren’t up to snuff, I’m not aware of that because they’re what I’m used to. I fall through to Google ( !g) if I think there might be more out there. The bang commands are so good. I use DDG as my main search in my search bar and then I can use the bang commands to get to whatever specialized search I want from there. It’s a meta-search-engine.
duck duck go on firefox.
I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.
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.
