What search engine do you use?
What search engine do you use?
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.
Currently down for updates, but does a great job of avoiding SEO abuse/blog spam/etc. Takes you back to the earlier days of the internet when it felt like there were more forums/individual sites/etc. They’re still out there, just hidden under all the junk.
Thanks I look forward to trying this.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for the past couple of years. I occasionally fall back to Google.
I was in this camp but find that the results I've gotten from DDG have been notably worse for the last year or so, to the point that I don't expect useful results to come out of it any more at this point. Even if I searched "site name" because I couldn't remember the URL was spelled "site-name.com" I've had no results coming from DDG, while Google had it as the first hit.
Have you experienced something similar? Are there techniques or workarounds I'm not aware of?
I honestly haven't noticed this. I can almost always find what I'm looking for with a general ddg search. Interesting.
Sadly, yes, and instances like this have me falling back to Google. I'd happily try something else, but I'm a bit at a loss right now. What would you suggest as another search engine to try?
@SemioticStandard Ecosia
Google, duck duck go when I don't want to see ads for days based on what I'm searching, Bing and Perplexity when I want to avoid doing a series of searches to learn something.
I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search
I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.
Thanks for making me aware of Kagi, I've been trialing it and getting decent results is a breath of fresh air in a world of blogspam and LLM garbage.
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I've been using Ecosia for a while and liking it. I think the results are usually better than Google and the image search is way more useful, still gives you direct links to the image files. Though most importantly I like planting trees.
DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.
I run my own searx instance
As someone who's only recently heard of SearXNG, why searx and not SearXNG?
SearXNG is a fork from searx, and improved a lot over the past 2 years (UI, translations, config options, ..)
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.
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?
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.
DuckDuckGo for me personally.
i use brave search (even if i'm on firefox), it gives good results while having an independent index
Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kagi on iOS and Mac. DDG w/Google on Android because my preferred Android browser, Vivaldi, doesn't offer Kagi. Anyone know how to default Vivaldi to Kagi?
DDG for everyday usage. Sometimes I try searching the same things on google just to compare results. I've tried searxng instances on and off in the past but its rarely been reliable for me and self hosting isn't really an option for me.
I'll give a search on Duck Duck Go, and if I can't find what I need then I'll use Google.
But at this point I'm using Google Bard and ChatGPT more and more, at least at work.
DuckDuckGo here.
Brave
Google. As much as I'd like to use other search engines, their search results are all severely lacking and not adequate for my needs (often pertaining to research) and they're generally not as great on the multilingual front or in searching pdfs.
I also have some keywords set up in my browser so I can directly search sites I use (e.g. Wikipedia).
I'm still looking for a search engine that doesn't use data from my IP address to provide targeted results. In the meantime, I've gone back and forth between using SearXNG instances and using Startpage, but there's really not a decent search engine in existence, from what I can tell.
I use DuckDuckGo, but mostly as a "terminal to the internet". In a few keystrokes i've opened a new tab, navigated to the homepage (https://start.duckduckgo.com/), then used a Bang to do a direct search inside the particular site or thing i need. For many things specially tech questions i do fall back to Google though
Duck duck go. Google for maps
I use mostly either ddg or brave search. I miss the google of pre 2010, when the majority of its results were good.
I also use Yandex whenever I'm looking for pirate stuff, the only engine that doesn't block those kinds of results.
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.
I've been using DuckDuckGo since, at least 2010, maybe earlier. If its results aren't up to snuff, I'm not aware of that because they're what I'm used to. I fall through to Google ( !g) if I think there might be more out there. The bang commands are so good. I use DDG as my main search in my search bar and then I can use the bang commands to get to whatever specialized search I want from there. It's a meta-search-engine.
Bing and DDG.
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Huh, interesting. Never knew such a thing existed or even imagined it.
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
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.)
Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use. Switched away from Google for privacy reasons and haven't missed it a bit.
Mostly duck duck go.
Same here. I know a lot of folks don't like the results, but to be honest, I don't find Google any better these days.
I exclusively use AltaVista.
DuckDuckGo, but mostly because of the !bangs. I do 90% of my searches through StartPage (!s), and the rest directly on a few websites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Arch wiki...).
I switched to DDG almost entirely because of the !w bang — Google massively downranking/hiding Wikipedia links made it a lot less useful to me.
Used to use SearXNG but got increasingly frustrated with it, so I mostly use DDG these days. Although, that being said, most search engines these days are filled with SEO clickbait trash which makes it basically mandatory to do site:reddit.com
Might have to try Kagi some day, despite my reservations about their pricing.
What frustrated you about SearXNG?
Many SearXNG hosts alter your search results without any easy way of opting out. For example, several will change Reddit links to Libreddit or use another frontend for Wikipedia and so on. Doing this, and not giving an accessible option to disable it, is unacceptable in my opinion. A search engine has no business in tampering with someone's results like this. If someone wishes to use Libreddit then that is their choice to do so - not the search provider's.
Qwant (but I hate all search engines nowadays)
Qwant is the best one i've come across
- Mainly uses its own index but might also query from Bing with pseudonymous data
- No sponsored links or sensoring
- Good image search
- Integrated maps that uses OpenStreetMap
Self-hosted Searxng. It's shared to multiple people which kills a lot of the usefulness in Google or others trying to track my instance.
I tried this, but it kept saying 'Engine failed' or something on every other search. I never could figure out why. I might try again
Edit: Actually it was Searx I used. I'll spin up Searxng and see if it's improved
I had some issues with searx.... Things are a bit better in my experience with searxng. Sometimes I still run into the error messages. But usually it's my fault more than anything (server bogged down, too many requests/searches across all my users, or internet blips)... I just rerun the search a few seconds later and it's usually good again.