I’ve been using Brave search for several months now. I switched the day that it was announced. The quality is fairly good, but I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little as it indexes more widely or something. At first I was impressed with how little spam ended up in top results, but lately exact queries for Python functions or prominent API functions have lots of spammy content above the actual documentation. Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc.<p>I’m still rooting for them, but in general
I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results on Google, DDG and now Brave. I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).
You know what, I welcome a new search provider, even if it's by a cryptocurrency company. I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo.<p>What I don't see is where Brave gets its image search results from. After Microsoft blatantly started serving the CCP by blocking queries for "tank man", which as far as I know they've never actually apologised for, just explained it as "a filter with more impact than expected" or some BS like that, I found out that most "competing" search engines bought all of their image search from Microsoft, leading to the same kind of censorship on platforms such as duckduckgo.<p>Brave says it's using "third parties" to generate the results but I can't easily see which third party that would be. If they are using Bing like all the others, I wouldn't trust their image search engine in the slightest.<p>Personally, I'll just assume they are for now, because they don't seem to clarify this further anywhere else.<p>From what I can tell, there are four image/video search providers in the world: Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu. The rest all seem to license their results from one of the big four, mostly from Bing. When I need to pick from those four, I'll stick with Google; their censorship is relatively mild. I was hoping Brave Search would prove to be an alternative in this area, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
For non-technical searches, mostly stuff relating to news, politics, or Covid, Google is next to useless at this point due to their attempts to combat misinformation. Even their autocomplete functionality guides potential search queries in an entirely unorganic manner. For instance, something may be trending according to google, while simultaneously being blacklisted as an autocomplete option- if it has Any elements of wrongthink about it.
I'm actually tempted to start using Brave.<p>I'm still holding out with Firefox despite Mozilla trying very hard to get rid of us (to the point where the thought has struck me more than once if the current CEO of Mozilla is in the pocket of Google).<p>If at some point the last competing mainstream browser engine is gone I'll probably go for Brave and I might start testing it this week.
It doesn't seem as good. My first search: what's the latest minecraft version<p>Brave: 1.14.4<p>Google: 1.17<p>Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years.<p>Second search: 白の意味<p>Brave: On Japan location 6 garbage search results + irrelevant wikipedia page. On United states 3 garbage search results before a relevant result. The first result is literally a private YouTube video. Seriously?<p>Google: Has a snippet about the meaning of white and the first result is a dictionary entry.<p>The indexing for Google seems to be equally as private, so brave search just seems like a downgrade.
Google used to be good at one point in time. Now its search results aren't very relevant, it returns what it thinks it should interest you, not what you've actually searched for. It doesn't matter if you do a verbatim search, it will still try to be smart and use alternative terms.
Unfortunately can't use it: I'm on my private VPN almost all the time (need it for work). VPN is hosted as OpenVPN service on German Digital Ocean server to have static public IP. The VPN is mine only (sure IP is not), I'm the only person who uses it. Brave Search shows error on accessing: <a href="https://ibb.co/72L3mc5" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/72L3mc5</a> . Other search engines open without problems. Turning off VPN helps, but I don't really understand why my (Digital Ocean's) ip is related to opening the web search page? Even if someone "compromised" that IP - it should not be a stopper to open the search from my point of logical view.
Great! I've recently mentioned that Brave Search is the only alternative search I've stuck to since day 1. Works much better for me than DDG or any other search has ever did.<p>Not perfect, rarely returns DE results instead of English, but from my point of view they're doing something good and I'm sold.<p>But please, give me a way to pay for it. I don't want to be the product, one day.
It's not clear whether users are opted-out the data collection by default or if this is something that we need to do manually. Looking at the settings, it looks like everyone is opted-in the data collection, and you have to manually opt-out, which is a nightmare for people like me who delete all browsing history, cookies, and data upon browser exit. I will stick with DuckDuckGo.
This reminds me to uninstall brave. Rebranded chromium with crypto shilling and now "premium search"? They didn't even test DNS with their tor feature, causing identity leaks.<p>Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled and include the codecs and DRM libs?
Woolyss builds do all that, but there's no fancy single download installer+auto updater. We need just "chromium".
Does anyone else find the font choice in Brave Search to be an obstacle for them? I just find it so hard to read.<p>I've set Brave as the default search in my browser (Chrome) in an attempt to give less of my traffic to Google, but most of the time I just get frustrated trying to read the search results and repeat the query in Google Search. I know it's ridiculous that I haven't just switched back to Google. I still want Brave to win, but trying to stay on the Brave page is an actively unpleasant experience. The closest analogy I can think of is that it feels like trying to make myself eat vegetables I hate (which is a poor analogy because I like vegetables!)
I've been using Brave Browser for almost a year already. I fallback to Chrome when I can't get through some Recaptchas: this is the only annoying thing on Brave, you get a lot of Recaptchas that are invisible on Chrome and some are impossible to solve.<p>I've also switched to Brave Search immediately when it come out. I'm satisfied with the search results I get for 90% of my queries, switching back to Google for the remaining 10%. My main problems with Brave Search are: 1. It doesn't have good localised results for non-english queries; here Google remains the best; 2. It doesn't have support for verbatim searching
Honest question. I have used DuckDuckGo and Brave Search and although they seem to do the job for generic searches they really suck for very specific searches.<p>How likely is for one of these search engines to catch-up technologically to Google's sophistication? I really can't see a clear trajectory for them to compete with Google's quality.
What I hate about Brave Search is that their bot disguises as a regular user and they don't publish the IP addresses of their bot. You can't target it through robots.txt and you'll never know if you've blocked one of their IP's by mistake.<p>Brave calls this a privacy feature. My ass.
I don't use Brave and know nothing about Brave Search, but any move away from breaking Google's virtual monopoly on search can't be bad.
Can anyone compare/contrast DuckDuckGo with Brave Search? I use the Brave browser and am a fan, but like many others, I search primarily with DDG, using the occasional g! <search> to see if something developer related shows up better there (I'd say 20%-10% of the time I find additional resources/answers on Google). Does BS have bang codes like DDG?
This is mostly common sense, but it'll be really interesting to see the metrics: People choosing to use the Brave browser should presumably trust Brave as their search as well, especially once the crypto ad scheme ties into their search engine too. This might be a case where most people follow along with the switch.
How decent is Brave as a browser? I've been very hesitant on it as a primary browser due to them starting up their own cryptocurrency (BAT), adding automatic affiliate cryptocurrency links in pages, and a history of serving their own ads on top of others.
"brave aquires search company" - 4th SERP is accurate [1]. Not to shabby! 100% of results from Brave index.<p>Congrats to Cliqz team.<p>It is a shame that Brave / Cliqz couldn't work with DuckDuckGo to help them get onto an independent index, assuming they would want that, instead of competing. I think there was already a lot of overlap in customer mindshare.<p>[1] <a href="https://search.brave.com/search?q=brave+aquires+search+company&source=web" rel="nofollow">https://search.brave.com/search?q=brave+aquires+search+compa...</a>
I've been using Brave for a few years now in combination with ublock origin - as Brave just does not block everything that's annoying. I use duckduckgo and don't see a need to switch to Brave search.<p>I primarily like the Brave sync feature, and it's actually the second main reason I recommend using Brave these days. It was quite junky when it was first released but by now it works like a charm for my 6 devices.
I've tried their search, it was ok, but my brain would get so stressed when not finding right info and would blame brave instead...<p>Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google (and other engines)?<p>The other problem with Brave is that crypto token integration in everywhere which feels more dystopian than Google's data gathering. And let's be honest - memory use after few days is same as Chrome's.
Brave browser is my go-to Android browser and i hope this initiative works out for the best.<p>One problem i regularly have is that the browser becomes unresponsive, e.g. won't update the screen. The only remedy is to close and open the browser.<p>On second thought i should probably go see if this issue is widespread.
I use DDG on desktop but on mobile they are unusable. Their app displays three ads out of 4 results in a page. A simple typo gives me completely different results.<p>I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all.
Just tried it out. Looks nice (except for that unremovable crypto button on the toolbar), but I need SpeechSynthesis (TTS) support. Will stay with FF and use MS Edge for its excellent TTS.<p>The search engine is pretty weak judging from my initial queries.
Well, that's brave move! :)<p>Already tried it several times and can share some experience:<p>* searching 'npm flag xyz' - working fine<p>* searching 'npm error some text' - just bad, a lot of non-relevant stuff.<p>Anyway, it's naive to expect a real Google competitor right now.
Between Google and Brave I prefer using Brave, but am I the only one bothered that this move is an abuse of power of a company that has both a browser and a search engine? We all know where this leads to.
Great, now I can accumulate my $.05 worth of monthly BAT a little faster!<p>Edit: I expected the YC crowd to pick up on Palantir puppets a bit faster. I'll gladly burn karma to get the word out though.
Still, Google owns everything in terms of search engines. You can't probably deny that, but it's a big prop to Brave for creating their unique search engine.
Nice to see the search results look the same with and without Javascript enabled.<p>Sadly not the image search. Surely this must be possible. We don't need inline previews.
Everyone making their own search engines these days. Notable mentions are the shady mobile browsers lol.<p>None of these can even scratch what Google as a search engine is.
ive been using brave search since release. i switched from DDG which was working for me. brave works for most of my purposes but when it doesn't the option to "anonymously gather google results" makes me feel like I'm never missing out
would be nice if you would display the number of results, this is a very helpful feature to me at least. I use it often to check if a phrase is grammatically correct or if one term is more popular than the other etc.
Joe Rogan mentioned on his show past week that he stopped using google search as well. Joe is convinced google is censoring results on covid, because he kept getting back official sources (benefits of the vaccine), when he was searching the opposite. Keyword searches for specific articles failed to return results.
He now questions what else google is censoring.
> Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported.<p>Well, there's that. I assume they won't implement ad blocking for that one.
are people still using brave after they have been caught multiple times - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controversies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...</a>
I usually use something like "My Public IPv4 is" to see what IP address is in the index to derive what provider a search engine is using.<p>However, Brave Search apparently does not even allow hard quotes and gives me random stuff related to IPv4. People keep saying that Google doesn't respect what you enter but for this query Google is the only one respecting it. DDG starts out with a few results matching it exactly but then goes off the rails with random results.