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What search engine do you use?

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.

boomer ,

Brave

xusontha ,

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 for Youtube They also plant trees and are carbon negative

chri_ho ,

I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.

kscutsforth ,

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

mollusk ,

I run my own searx instance

jadenity ,

As someone who's only recently heard of SearXNG, why searx and not SearXNG?

sorchist ,

I've been using DuckDuckGo since, at least 2010, maybe earlier. If its results aren't up to snuff, I'm not aware of that because they're what I'm used to. I fall through to Google ( !g) if I think there might be more out there. The bang commands are so good. I use DDG as my main search in my search bar and then I can use the bang commands to get to whatever specialized search I want from there. It's a meta-search-engine.

davehtaylor ,

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.

jadenity ,

As often as I hear others with the opposite opinion, my experience is very similar to yours. If I want to find the answer to a question fast, I just use Google. If I'm just browsing a new topic, I try DDG first and much of the time end up using Google anyway.

ian ,

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.

bill ,

Thanks I look forward to trying this.

yousefsh98 ,
@yousefsh98@mstdn.games avatar

@SemioticStandard Ecosia

eight_byte ,

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

Midou ,

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.)

Saik0Shinigami ,
@Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com avatar

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 ,
@copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.com avatar

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

Saik0Shinigami ,
@Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com avatar

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.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

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.

nachtigall ,

Qwant (but I hate all search engines nowadays)

newtraditionalists ,

Mostly duck duck go.

Ix9 ,

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.

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