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.
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.
Nice. I’ve stood one up now and it seems to be working nicely:
https://searxng.fosshost.com
Awesome! Only thing I see wrong… I see version 1.0.0, I believe (and could be wrong) that they changed the versioning of it to a date-based system about a year ago… If so you might be running an older version. I run the docker version and I do in this specific case use the latest tag.
I’ve spun up my own SearXNG instance, and it’s the best search engine I’ve ever used.
Is this like when people say arch is fun?
Seeing as I absolutely hate using arch linux (sorry to those who like it I guess) I would say no.
There is even one script that does all the work for you, so it’s dead simple.
To compare, PeerTube was a bit more of a slog with many steps and a few chances to break things (the fun happened when I had to uninstall the official npm because despite the installer saying it would install 16.x, it installed 18.x, and that really upset PeerTube). I then had to use nvm, and that was fine until a step failed as I forgot to soft link my local npm binary to /usr/bin or something like that.
tldr: please for goodness sakes fediverse, make your setup scripts a once and done affair!!!
Same here