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.
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.
@eight_byte @monotrox How do you differentiate ‘serious’ search requests?
I’m considering Kagi but I’m a very trivial person.
With trivial search requests, I mean stuff like entering the name of a company as a search term, where you could have easily just entered the direct URL in our browser instead. There is almost no benefit for using Kagi on this. Almost every search engine will give you the result you are looking for as the first search result.
Kagi is perfect people doing a lot of research in the web. I am a software developer. When I try to find solutions for programming related topics, Kagi gives me much better results than Google since they don’t show me all the ads and don’t do weird ranking stuff. Also, I am able to ask Kagi to only show discussion from public forums or even let them summarize the results via AI. Doing product research is also a lot more helpful with Kagi.
@eight_byte That’s a great answer, thanks.
I think I’ll give it a whirl and see how I get on. Search seems to have generally gotten a *lot* worse lately and I’ve been guilty of using ChatGPT to augment some of my searches for work-related stuff. Maybe Kagi is a better answer.
It should. As far as I know, ChatGPT is not connected to the internet and therefore doesn’t have access to recent information.
@eight_byte Oh yes, I mean I use ChatGPT more semantically, to help me figure out how to search for the right things.
Not sure how anyone gets away with 300 searches in a month, but I’ve been on a ~$10/mo plan (might be grandfathered) that has 1500 searches and I’ve never reached my limit. And I search a lot
Why didn’t they raise the limit or kept that for $10 subscription?
It’s a bit weird to me how much simple queries can cost. It’s basically amount to 10 searches a day for $5 subscription and about 33 searches a day for $10 subscription. Depending on circumstances, I would be searching a lot for very difficult to find information related to programming, so I could see $25/mo as a steep price to pay.
Another Kagi convert here. Switched over late last year after hearing about it on the Python Bytes podcast. Thanks to doing it that early I’m on the “Early Adopter Professional” plan, so 10 bucks per month for 1500 searches which I’m happy to pay. Just being able to fully mute shitty sites is already so much worth it.