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.
The only correct answer here is to use an instance of SearXNG because it’s open source, utilizes privacy, and queries every kind of search engine that exists on the internet.
This.
Plus some instances like searx.tiekoetter.com replace links to page that contain ads and trackers with their alternative (twitter with nitter, YouTube with Invidious, reddit with libreddit, etc).
This thread inspired me to stop procrastinating and deploy my own instance. On a brand new Debian 12 install (an LXC container in Proxmox), the process is absolutely simple and painless.
Dunno what it portends, but that link has an update that “SearX instances (not SearXNG) will soon get removed from this list”
It’s because reasons.
@BaroqueInMind @SemioticStandard @speck
Looks nice. Wondering how many times people get confused by the project description, though, when they read “privacy respecting” immediately followed up by “hackable”. 🙃