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.

  • acow@programming.dev
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Leigh@beehaw.orgOPM
      3·
      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?

    • fckgwrhqq2yxrkt@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Kagi has been such an upgrade over traditional search, but the search limit absolutely hurts my enjoyment of it. Little things you don’t think about like adjusting your search a little to get better results add up quickly for me. I’m putting more thought into “is this worth searching on kagi” than I want, and that has prevented me from setting it as my default search. Great service held back by its limits.

    • Sev@pawb.social
      1·
      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.