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.
It’s become less that DDG became better than Google and more that Google has been abysmal lately. Their algorithm has been overwhelmed by bots, the top 3 results are ads and the rest of the page is usually spam clickbait articles written by AI. It was a nightmare when I wanted help with disk partitioning. All spam.
I use duckduckgo now too. It’s private and better!