1y ago

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.

114 comments

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.
- If you pay there's an option for chatgpt4 that can use Bing to search. There's also various plugins that can let it interact with all sorts of additional data sources. Not that you should use it like a search engine exactly, but it can be useful for search if you configure it correctly and understand that it doesn't "know" anything.
- I can see a usecase for where you don't know where to start or search with, and then verify with actual searches.
  I recently used it to explain for a friend what is the difference between wheat and ale beer, and it gave a very good summary. With DDG I might not get a direct explanation and would need to read a few articles and then word them in a comprehensive way.
- 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.
- Maybe people mainly search for answers to simple daily life questions or something.
  
  I guess, but it's still not a search engine and I think it's a bit problematic if that's the usecase.

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.
- don’t use brave:
  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation
  https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

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.

https://www.marginalia.nu/
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.

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 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, ..)

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

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'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?
  
  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?
  
  I honestly haven't noticed this. I can almost always find what I'm looking for with a general ddg search. Interesting.

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.

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 having to thinking about it.

I use my selfhosted Whoogle instance for search

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?

I use DuckDuckGo. Including using their browser on iOS and windows.

DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.

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.

DuckDuckGo for me personally.

Duck Duck Go too

@SemioticStandard Kagi. I used DDG for a long time, and Kagi is strictly better. Specifically, it’s very snappy and I trust the privacy guarantees even more since I’m a paying customer.
- Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down) without looking for Reddit results all the time.
  Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
  And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
  Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
  And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit or archive.org versions), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
  Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
  Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.
  Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
  (copied from another thread I replied to)
  
  What plan are you on? Did you adjust your usage behavior to not waste search queries?
- I use Kagi too, it’s surprisingly snappy! Like seriously impressive for a small org. They talk about speed optimisation being critical for them as well. I find the result to be excellent as well. A true Google replacement/feels like Google in its prime.
  I believe they have their own index and bot as well?
- +1 for Kagi, seems a great value to me, well worth the price to not have any ads, no tracking (leap of faith here) and great search results.

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.

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'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.
- 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?

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.
- What are !bangs and how do I use them?
  
  Take a look at this page.
- Yes, the bangs are a game changer! They even work well on niche sites like Jisho and Scryfall.
  
  Bangs to search Scryfall might actually be a selling point for me. I've been experimenting with Kagi, seems like it also supports that as well. This is amazing, thank you for this useful information. :D

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.

DuckDuckGo for general searches
Google for image searches
Google maps for local businesses (including their website)
BingGPT for simple research answers (e.g. What door closers will fit on a Norton 1600 bolt pattern?)

i use brave search (even if i'm on firefox), it gives good results while having an independent index

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.

duck duck go on firefox.

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

Startpage.com

DuckDuckGo. Its results are much better than Google's in my experience. Whenever I Google something, all I get is a list of online stores I've never heard of, and they have nothing to do with my search input.
- For me the main thing that makes me stick to DDG is the bangs - adding for example !wiki in the beginning of a search term to search directly in Wikipedia. It is a game changer, especially as I often need to search in specific sources for work. For example, !scholar for direct access to Google Scholar is great.
  Whenever I think Google will provide better results it's as easy as !g - but I am also experiencing that the results are increasingly unhelpful (often geared towards shopping rather than information).

Google and ChatGPT, I tried DDG several years ago, but the results were not good, might try it again

binh. its always worked, gives me rewards, and now bing chat is awesome

Ecosia. I like trees.
- I'd use Ecosia still if it weren't for the fact that the filter is missing the "last year" setting. I'm a software engineer - 9 times out of 10, I want to find the bugs for a very specific version of a software, so having the year filter helps.
  I now use Brave Search.
  
  Fair point. I use ecosia to search everyday stuff on my phone and I've planted a lot of trees just by that. The results are fine.
  At work for specific enquiries I use Google because I know how to get the details out of it at first. I don't remember doing a Google search without additional tags. F.i. At work I use visual basic a lot and since it's a shit language I have to Google everything including "vba excel". There's not a lot of logic to it, I just need to dive into the right post head on.
  It points at a deeper problem though. There's sooo much garbage on the internet that I have no idea of how ordinary people are supposed to use it anymore. I'm not disenfranching anyone, but for someone like my mom. How the fuck is she ever going to get an answer of any search? Google just plain sucks by now.
- Do you know if ecosia is still using google under the hoods?
  
  Apparently not, but the (usable) results are much the same. Ecosia was borrowing from yahoo and bing, but they changed that some years ago.
  I have no idea of what or how they're doing it now, but then I also only search explicit things. I never liked the idea of a search engine trying to understand what I was actually looking for, so I state myself clearly in that regard.

DuckDuckGo, and before that, I used ixquick(which is now StartPage).

Currently DuckDuckGo, but I will switch to SearXNG because of this.

I typically use StartPage, sometimes DDG. Occasionally I pop in and check out how Brave Search is progressing, out of curiosity.
I would love to use Searx, but I've never found an instance where functionality wasn't breaking all the time or it just randomly goes offline. As much as I want to be, I've learned that I'm not much of a self-hoster. So, yeah, every time I try Searx, I wind up back at StartPage. If anyone has any solid, reliable instances they know of, I'd love to check them out.

Duck duck go. Google for maps

I use SearXNG and Ecosia.

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.

I exclusively use AltaVista.

DuckDuckGo here.

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 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

Duckduckgo

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.

Bing and DDG.

I am a long time DuckDuckGo user. I came for privacy and stayed because of the features.

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.)

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

The only correct answer here is to use an instance of SearXNG because it's open source, utilizes privacy, and queries every kind of search engine that exists on the internet.
- This thread inspired me to stop procrastinating and deploy my own instance. On a brand new Debian 12 install (an LXC container in Proxmox), the process is absolutely simple and painless.
- This.
  Plus some instances like searx.tiekoetter.com replace links to page that contain ads and trackers with their alternative (twitter with nitter, YouTube with Invidious, reddit with libreddit, etc).
  
  Do you know of a way i can implement that on an instance i'm self-hosting?
- Dunno what it portends, but that link has an update that "SearX instances (not SearXNG) will soon get removed from this list"
  
  It's because reasons.

Using DDG. However, I am finding fewer and fewer results for my searches, that I want to click on. I dont think this is due to DDG sucking, I think this is due to the web itself just being full of useless bloat... sites that just scrape information from other sites that scrape information from other sites. Looking for actual reviews of items? Good luck.
- I think this is due to the web itself just being full of useless bloat… sites that just scrape information from other sites that scrape information from other sites. Looking for actual reviews of items? Good luck.
  It hurts how true this is. Especially for reviews.

114 comments