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.

  • lentilhoarder@beehaw.org
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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 the world of blogspam and LLM garbage.

  • eight_byte@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.

    • monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 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

      • eight_byte@feddit.de
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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 thinking about it.

  • Kir@feddit.it
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    1 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.

    • tenet@kbin.social
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      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.

      • Kir@feddit.it
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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.

          • Kir@feddit.it
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            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

            • newde@beehaw.org
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              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…

  • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    DuckDuckGo. Its results are much better than Google’s in my experience. Whenever I Google something, all I get is a list of online stores I’ve never heard of, and they have nothing to do with my search input.

  • xusontha@l.buckodr.ink
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    1 year ago

    I use Ecosia. It works quite well, and if I ever need to search something on Google instead (like a coin flip/stock ticker) you can just do #g or #yt for Youtube They also plant trees and are carbon negative

  • Midou@kbin.projectsegfau.lt
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    1 year ago

    SearXNG, searches every search engine and regroups them in a single list, alongside the very powerful “bang” variant they use (“!!” is like “!” for ddg, and “!” is to only search with this search engine, “:en” is to choose a specific shortcode language.)

  • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    They’re all garbage. Content farms and SEO nonsense has been flooding search engines with useless garbage for years. Either that or pages that simply copy forum threads over and over and over so you get a whole results page of what appears to be different sites, but are all a copy of the same forum thread from 2007. Or they grab your search string and then you have a page that looks like it’s exactly what you need, only to find out it’s scammy bullshit. But AI is making that whole problem exponentially worse.

    I’ve tried DDG many many times over the years. Sometimes it’s ok. But overall, most of the results i get just aren’t relevant, and it seems like over the last year or two DDG’s results have gotten way worse. I always end up back on Google. As crappy as Google is, the results still end up being more relevant overall.