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.
@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)
@Nankeru @SemioticStandard ohhhh can you share your Lemmy lens?
Kagi is sounding. But looks I’d have to learn to use crypto in order to use with anonymity
Kagi is not a purely anonymous service. They keep track of how MANY queries you run for billing purposes. (They never track WHAT you search for). No special crypto stuff needed.
@speck @SemioticStandard @Nankeru
What plan are you on? Did you adjust your usage behavior to not waste search queries?
Didn’t adjust my usage at all. I used the plan with 1000 searches, but since I work as an IT administrator and literally make searches everyday throughout the day multiple times, I changed to the ultimate plan.
For normal (home / mobile) usage, 1000 searches are more than enough for 2 people.
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?
How effective is this stance? While using a service for free basically guarantees there are privacy concerns, paying doesn’t directly provide any assurances. They can both charge you money and sell your data.
But Kagi seems pretty expensive, and too reliant on Bing/Google search pricing to be a long-term solution.
certainly it’s not a panacea. But Kagi’s entire value proposition is that they charge you to cover their costs. If they sell my data, they lose all credibility and the business dies more or less immediately. That creates a strong incentive for them to build in privacy by default.
Plus it just feels better to me. I’m sick of the hidden cost of free digital services. I sleep better when I pay for the things I need.
@Goronmon @SemioticStandard
“I pay them to lie to me, I don’t get lied to for free!”
I’d never heard of Kagi before. How do their results compare to DDG or Google?
In my opinion, much better than DDG and Google. With DDG, I had to fall back to !g relatively often, and with Google the results became wildly inconsistent in the past few years, often showing several sponsored posts before showing me something useful.
The plan with a 1000 searches per month is imo well worth the cost.
+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’m also a Kagi user, and it’s completely replaced Google for me for everything except the occasional image search. It’s awesome, and I consider it worth the price.
I do a lot of searches so for the time being my default search engine is Ecosia and when it fails I use Kagi. That way it doesn’t get too expensive :)
Yaay kagi! Totally worth it’s money for me, I only have to fall back to Google once every few days (mostly for very local, obscure searches) and am very happy with the results otherwise.