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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#561

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Seirdy wrote: post #109
jonathansampson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're referring to Fallback Mixing , which is off by default. You have to enable it in https://search.brave.com/settings . When enabled, this feature will (at times) pull in results from Google via an anonymous query, routed through the browser. Read more about it here: https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback

This has not been my experience. Comparing results with Google, Startpage, and a Searx instance with only Google enabled reveals that the results are almost always from Google. Sometimes they merge multiple results that share a domain. I decided to add them to the "Semi-Independent" category of my collection of indexing search engines: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

Interesting. I couldn't reproduce those results. Certain queries did produce _very_ identical results, but others did not. In some of those cases Google and Startpage did better.

Re: Brave Search beta

#562

Post by crowf »

2 minor comments:

1 on mobile it is very convenient to have an x in the search box in order to clear that text from the previous search

2 when correcting spelling it would be nice if it bolded the word that was misspelled rather then the entire search phrase

Re: Brave Search beta

#563

Post by dgan »

jonathansampson wrote: post #422
smoldesu wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place . Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.

We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models: 1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution. and 2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls f…

I actually don't mind seeing ads for stuff I like, and the idea to redirect revenu to support content creators is appealing. Right now I see 0 ads, maybe will get fancy and try Brave for fun

Re: Brave Search beta

#564

Post by hnlmorg »

zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine. I can't express how exciting this is to me. Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up changing the default search engine back to Google. I mean, DDG worked f…

DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite).

The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean that DDG's results can't be as good as G's, it just means you need to add that context yourself. Like if you search for a coding problem, add your computer language name to the search query. Or if you're search for a restaurant, add in your home town too.

I've found DDG's results to be comparable to Google's and in fact in the last ~3 years of exclusively using DDG, I can count on one hand the number of times I've tried searching for something in Google after a failed search in DDG.

Image searching is a little more hit and miss though. G's image search is better -- generally speaking. However DDG doesn't include Pinterest spam. So if you're after something specific using image searching, Google is better. But if you're after a general list of usable images, then DDG is better.

Re: Brave Search beta

#565

Post by c-fe »

When I search for “uva”, all the first results point to university of virginia, instead or university of amsterdam, even though the latter has more students, is older and higher ranked. The former does not even contain uva in their URL while the latter is uva.nl. From a neutral, international point of view, why should this Virginia school rank higher in searches than UVA?

Situatiouns like these are what ultimately led me to switch from Duckduckgo back to google, and i test these things everytime I consider a new search. What is the use of privacy if the search results are not relevant to me?

Re: Brave Search beta

#566

Post by ernesth »

mderazon wrote: post #359

DDG search is fine for me, the thing I think Google still does better is all the searches like "what's the weather in X", "3.5 miles to km", "what's the next NBA game" etc I found that Google still does these things much better.

Google has taught people to ask full questions (without question marks strangely), and knows how to treat those requests (Who is the mayor of Palo Alto; What's the weather in X"...). DDG is a little worse at that.

I expect search engines to search for every words in my request, and I prefer shorter requests. DDG gives pertinent instant answers for "weather Paris", "3.5mi in km" and correct results for NBA schedule.

Re: Brave Search beta

#567

Post by __ka »

c-fe wrote: post #565

When I search for “uva”, all the first results point to university of virginia, instead or university of amsterdam, even though the latter has more students, is older and higher ranked. The former does not even contain uva in their URL while the latter is uva.nl. From a neutral, international point of view, why should this Virginia school rank higher in searches than UVA? Situatiouns like these are what ultimately le…

The chosen country is important. `uva` may be more commonly associated with the University of Virginia in the US. For Netherlands (same query) https://search.brave.com/search?q=uva&country=nl will correctly point to Universiteit van Amsterdam.

At present we default to country US. We're looking to implement better defaults soon.

We do hope you stick around!

Re: Brave Search beta

#568

Post by mackrevinack »

hnlmorg wrote: post #564
zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine. I can't express how exciting this is to me. Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up changing the default search engine back to Google. I mean, DDG worked f…

DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite). The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean th…

DDG also makes it very to download images, unlike Google that now makes you go though to whatever site and have to scroll around in the page to find the image

Re: Brave Search beta

#569

Post by paraknight »

hnlmorg wrote: post #564
zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine. I can't express how exciting this is to me. Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up changing the default search engine back to Google. I mean, DDG worked f…

DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite). The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean th…

> but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling

I disagree. I've tried to switch to DDG several times too, and always go back to StartPage, which is a proxy for Google, and the results were always better even without profiling. There is a case to be made for Google having better results globally from aggregate user behaviour though.

Re: Brave Search beta

#570

Post by c-fe »

__ka wrote: post #567
c-fe wrote: post #565

When I search for “uva”, all the first results point to university of virginia, instead or university of amsterdam, even though the latter has more students, is older and higher ranked. The former does not even contain uva in their URL while the latter is uva.nl. From a neutral, international point of view, why should this Virginia school rank higher in searches than UVA? Situatiouns like these are what ultimately le…

The chosen country is important. `uva` may be more commonly associated with the University of Virginia in the US. For Netherlands (same query) https://search.brave.com/search?q=uva&country=nl will correctly point to Universiteit van Amsterdam. At present we default to country US. We're looking to implement better defaults soon. We do hope you stick around!

Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to address my problem, however me having to change the country manually sounds like an additional workaround. I wish you the best luck though with your search!
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