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 spent quite a bit of time comparing DDG and Google before making the switch and I couldn’t find much difference. Google is a bit better for searching news, it probably indexes more often. But other than that the results were similar except DDG wasn’t all ads at the top. I haven’t missed Google since the switch. Every time I come back in the hope it will find something DDG didn’t, it fails to do any better.