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.
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.
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.
If you pay there’s an option for chatgpt4 that can use Bing to search. There’s also various plugins that can let it interact with all sorts of additional data sources. Not that you should use it like a search engine exactly, but it can be useful for search if you configure it correctly and understand that it doesn’t “know” anything.
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.
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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.
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That’s quite the escalation. This is a reminder to be nice on this instance.
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
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…
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 run my own searx instance
As someone who’s only recently heard of SearXNG, why searx and not SearXNG?
SearXNG is a fork from searx, and improved a lot over the past 2 years (UI, translations, config options, …)
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.
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.
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.
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?
I honestly haven’t noticed this. I can almost always find what I’m looking for with a general ddg search. Interesting.
I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.
I’ve been using Ecosia for a while and liking it. I think the results are usually better than Google and the image search is way more useful, still gives you direct links to the image files. Though most importantly I like planting trees.
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.
DuckDuckGo, but mostly because of the !bangs. I do 90% of my searches through StartPage (!s), and the rest directly on a few websites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Arch wiki…).
I switched to DDG almost entirely because of the !w bang — Google massively downranking/hiding Wikipedia links made it a lot less useful to me.
What are !bangs and how do I use them?
Take a look at this page.
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.
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn’t cutting it.
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