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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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[–] acow@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you using DDG in addition to Kagi because of Kagi's limited number of searches per month, or because DDG does something better?

I'm a bit conflicted about Kagi because $5/month is a plausible price, but the limited number of searches seems like it would add an extra step of, "Do I want to use my limited search resource on this search?" to every search, which is an unwanted extra bit of friction.

[–] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I use DDG because I'm still not decided on whether or not Kagi is worth it. If there's no significant difference in the results returned by DDG, why pay for Kagi?

[–] SevYote@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

I've been using Kagi for a couple weeks. I've so far found it to be excellent. One thing to note is it supports DDG-style bangs, and those don't count against your search quota, so getting used to using them for wiki, youtube, IMDB, etc., is worth it. I also bumped up to the $10 plan, just to wash out any second-guessing on searches, although the price even if you exceed your quota is pretty cheap, and it seems like most people probably do far fewer searches than I do.

I still find DDG to be pretty terrible, but I have very occasionally fallen back to google, mainly for specifically searches for businesses / services near me, that kind of thing, or for searches for very recent things - somebody had posted a screenshot of an article on IIRC Fortune Magazine's site. I wanted to read it, and it turned out the article was only a few hours old at that time. Google had it indexed, but Kagi didn't yet.

For more general searches and technical searches I do for work, though, it's been very very good, and those are the most important searches, to me.