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.
You’re technically right that it gets its results from many sources, but most (like the vast majority) of the results come from Bing. they even admit it themselves right on their help page.
This is in contrast with Brave search which gets its results entirely from its own index, unless you enable the “google fallback mixing” option.
I use both search engines myself, as well as Searxng. Also Brave search basically has nothing to do with the Brave browser except that it’s by the same company. I don’t use the browser, but the search engine is pretty cool.