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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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What search engine do you use? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 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] 1 points 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.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Qwant (but I hate all search engines nowadays)