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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
@eight_byte @monotrox How do you differentiate ‘serious’ search requests?
I’m considering Kagi but I’m a very trivial person.
With trivial search requests, I mean stuff like entering the name of a company as a search term, where you could have easily just entered the direct URL in our browser instead. There is almost no benefit for using Kagi on this. Almost every search engine will give you the result you are looking for as the first search result.
@eight_byte That’s a great answer, thanks.
I think I’ll give it a whirl and see how I get on. Search seems to have generally gotten a *lot* worse lately and I’ve been guilty of using ChatGPT to augment some of my searches for work-related stuff. Maybe Kagi is a better answer.
It should. As far as I know, ChatGPT is not connected to the internet and therefore doesn’t have access to recent information.
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.
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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.
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.
I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search
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’ve been using Kagi for a couple weeks. I’ve so far found it to be excellent. One thing to note is it supports DDG-style bangs, and those don’t count against your search quota, so getting used to using them for wiki, youtube, IMDB, etc., is worth it. I also bumped up to the $10 plan, just to wash out any second-guessing on searches, although the price even if you exceed your quota is pretty cheap, and it seems like most people probably do far fewer searches than I do.
I still find DDG to be pretty terrible, but I have very occasionally fallen back to google, mainly for specifically searches for businesses / services near me, that kind of thing, or for searches for very recent things - somebody had posted a screenshot of an article on IIRC Fortune Magazine’s site. I wanted to read it, and it turned out the article was only a few hours old at that time. Google had it indexed, but Kagi didn’t yet.
For more general searches and technical searches I do for work, though, it’s been very very good, and those are the most important searches, to me.
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.
I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.
Kagi on iOS and Mac. DDG w/Google on Android because my preferred Android browser, Vivaldi, doesn’t offer Kagi. Anyone know how to default Vivaldi to Kagi?
