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What search engine do you use? (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago by SemioticStandard to c/technology

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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.

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[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Self-hosted Searxng. It's shared to multiple people which kills a lot of the usefulness in Google or others trying to track my instance.

[–] copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.com 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I tried this, but it kept saying 'Engine failed' or something on every other search. I never could figure out why. I might try again

Edit: Actually it was Searx I used. I'll spin up Searxng and see if it's improved

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had some issues with searx.... Things are a bit better in my experience with searxng. Sometimes I still run into the error messages. But usually it's my fault more than anything (server bogged down, too many requests/searches across all my users, or internet blips)... I just rerun the search a few seconds later and it's usually good again.

[–] copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice. I've stood one up now and it seems to be working nicely:

https://searxng.fosshost.com

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 2 points 1 year ago

Awesome! Only thing I see wrong... I see version 1.0.0, I believe (and could be wrong) that they changed the versioning of it to a date-based system about a year ago... If so you might be running an older version. I run the docker version and I do in this specific case use the latest tag.

[–] beepnoise 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve spun up my own SearXNG instance, and it’s the best search engine I’ve ever used.

[–] fades 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is this like when people say arch is fun?

[–] beepnoise 1 points 1 year ago

Seeing as I absolutely hate using arch linux (sorry to those who like it I guess) I would say no.

There is even one script that does all the work for you, so it’s dead simple.

To compare, PeerTube was a bit more of a slog with many steps and a few chances to break things (the fun happened when I had to uninstall the official npm because despite the installer saying it would install 16.x, it installed 18.x, and that really upset PeerTube). I then had to use nvm, and that was fine until a step failed as I forgot to soft link my local npm binary to /usr/bin or something like that.

tldr: please for goodness sakes fediverse, make your setup scripts a once and done affair!!!

[–] minnix@lemux.minnix.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Same here