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 used to use ddg, but i switched to brave search (even on firefox) as the results are surprisingly good despite the fact that they use their own index. It also supports bangs btw, if you used to use those on duckduckgo.
If i had rank search engines it’d be:
If you disable javascript, 1-3 work mostly fine, on startpage you lose the extra info banners and just get results, duckduckgo’s interface looks a bit less fancy but it works the same, and brave search works & looks exactly the same but you lose the brave ai integration at the top, however the regular info banners still appear on the right. Swisscows doesn’t load without JS.