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.
I’ve always been underwhelmed with DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and for context on that remark I use Bing as my main search engine.
Honestly I find all search engines to be somewhat unusable in today’s day and age. It made me realize how much I relied on reddit keywords when all those results were private, and everything else was AI generated SEO ad farms. Bing seems to be slightly better than everything else, and the convenient occasional access to GPT when everything else is trash is nice to have.
Is bing actually still just bad? Google just pushes stores for search results when I’m just trying to figure out how shit works so I’m so ready to switch permanently.
Not op, but I used it the other day when I got fed up with google bascally only giving me amazon results when I was looking for something, and yeah it was better (admittedly, it was more like how google used to be, which I view as better). I don’t really think bing is the solution though, can absolutely see them being enshittified shortly if they get enough people to start using bing.