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 set Bing as my default for about a year and even used Edge as my daily driver for a few years. The amount of garbage popups and irrelevant crap all over the results has made me jump to Firefox and back to Google/DDG. I was starting to get the hang of the M$ stuff and they pushed me away. I was annoyed but ok with the weird/creepy web coupon popups but they just kept shoving more and more crap at me until I broke.