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.

  • tenet
    0•1 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      0•1 year ago

      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.

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 year ago

          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

          • @[email protected]
            1•1 year ago

            Don’t worry, you are in the right: a LLM is not a search engine. You might integrate it into a search engine, but that doesn’t make it a search engine.

            I mean it’s so glaringly obvious it is not a search engine: every time you ask ChatGPT for information it will give you a disclaimer it’s database is from 2021 and prior…