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.
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 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.
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 for me personally.
DDG for everyday usage. Sometimes I try searching the same things on google just to compare results. I’ve tried searxng instances on and off in the past but its rarely been reliable for me and self hosting isn’t really an option for me.
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Why’d you have to go and make me think about Buendnerfleisch? Import to the states has been banned for years.
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn’t cutting it.
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.
Duck Duck Go too
I’ve been using Ecosia for a while and liking it. I think the results are usually better than Google and the image search is way more useful, still gives you direct links to the image files. Though most importantly I like planting trees.
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.
Are you using DDG in addition to Kagi because of Kagi’s limited number of searches per month, or because DDG does something better?
I’m a bit conflicted about Kagi because $5/month is a plausible price, but the limited number of searches seems like it would add an extra step of, “Do I want to use my limited search resource on this search?” to every search, which is an unwanted extra bit of friction.
I use DDG because I’m still not decided on whether or not Kagi is worth it. If there’s no significant difference in the results returned by DDG, why pay for Kagi?
I exclusively use AltaVista.
