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

submitted 1 year ago by SemioticStandard@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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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[–] rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@eight_byte @monotrox How do you differentiate 'serious' search requests?

I'm considering Kagi but I'm a very trivial person.

[–] eight_byte@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

Kagi is perfect people doing a lot of research in the web. I am a software developer. When I try to find solutions for programming related topics, Kagi gives me much better results than Google since they don't show me all the ads and don't do weird ranking stuff. Also, I am able to ask Kagi to only show discussion from public forums or even let them summarize the results via AI. Doing product research is also a lot more helpful with Kagi.

[–] rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@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.

[–] eight_byte@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

It should. As far as I know, ChatGPT is not connected to the internet and therefore doesn't have access to recent information.