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 mostly use DuckDuckGo, because it gives a good mix of quality results and a strong privacy commitment. I really like the idea of distributed search and love the idea behind the yacy search engine. http://yacy.net however it doesn’t quite give strong enough results yet for me to use it as a daily driver.
I’ve honestly just started using Perplexity as my primary search engine. If I’m basically using search as a way to avoid typing a URL, then I use ddg with a prefix.
