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’ve spun up my own SearXNG instance, and it’s the best search engine I’ve ever used.
Is this like when people say arch is fun?
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!!!