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.

1 point

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

permalink
report
reply
1 point

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

permalink
report
reply
0 points

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
reply
2 points

DuckDuckGo for me personally.

permalink
report
reply
1 point

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.

permalink
report
reply
0 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points
*

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

You sound like you’re desperately trying to play a losing semantic game.

https://blogs.bing.com/search/march_2023/Confirmed-the-new-Bing-runs-on-OpenAI%E2%80%99s-GPT-4

Fuck off.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Technology

!technology@beehaw.org

Create post

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.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Community stats

  • 2.8K

    Monthly active users

  • 2.9K

    Posts

  • 54K

    Comments