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.

  • @[email protected]
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    91 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      I can see a usecase for where you don’t know where to start or search with, and then verify with actual searches.

      I recently used it to explain for a friend what is the difference between wheat and ale beer, and it gave a very good summary. With DDG I might not get a direct explanation and would need to read a few articles and then word them in a comprehensive way.

    • tenet
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      01 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]
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        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]
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            11 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]
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              11 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…

    • 雨 月
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      01 year ago

      Maybe people mainly search for answers to simple daily life questions or something.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        I guess, but it’s still not a search engine and I think it’s a bit problematic if that’s the usecase.

  • I Cast Fist
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    51 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    41 year ago

    I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      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?

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        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?

    • @[email protected]
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      01 year ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • @[email protected]
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            1 year ago

            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.

  • Saik0
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    41 year ago

    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.

    • @copylefty
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Saik0
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        21 year ago

        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.

          • Saik0
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            11 year ago

            Awesome! Only thing I see wrong… I see version 1.0.0, I believe (and could be wrong) that they changed the versioning of it to a date-based system about a year ago… If so you might be running an older version. I run the docker version and I do in this specific case use the latest tag.

  • @[email protected]
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    41 year ago

    https://www.marginalia.nu/

    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.

  • Link.wav [he/him]
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    31 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    31 year ago

    Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven’t missed it a bit.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    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.