this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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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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[–] Midou@kbin.projectsegfau.lt 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.)

[–] xusontha@l.buckodr.ink 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

[–] Bannanable@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago
[–] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're all garbage. Content farms and SEO nonsense has been flooding search engines with useless garbage for years. Either that or pages that simply copy forum threads over and over and over so you get a whole results page of what appears to be different sites, but are all a copy of the same forum thread from 2007. Or they grab your search string and then you have a page that looks like it's exactly what you need, only to find out it's scammy bullshit. But AI is making that whole problem exponentially worse.

I've tried DDG many many times over the years. Sometimes it's ok. But overall, most of the results i get just aren't relevant, and it seems like over the last year or two DDG's results have gotten way worse. I always end up back on Google. As crappy as Google is, the results still end up being more relevant overall.

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[–] papegaai@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Bing and DDG.

[–] BigVault@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bing/Bing chat in combination with Microsoft Rewards.

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[–] tenet@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

A combination of DDG and Google. DDG's results too often look like a list of sponsors so when that happens I fuck right back off to Google.

Get an ad blocker, get Privacy Badger, use a VPN, experience the internet the way it was before corporate shitbags got hold of it. Mostly.

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[–] nameless_prole@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Can we stop trying to coin cute terms like "enshittification"? What that term describes is just capitalism working as intended.

There is a term that describes this behavior that we've been using for at least decades (to describe behavior that has happened since the inception of capitalism): rent seeking.

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[–] zlatiah@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Self-hosted SearXNG. Very easy to self-host, and (for the most part) works just fine

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