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Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

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Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will never catch up because Google is the only one dedicating enough engineering to match the growing amount of information, and their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results.

There is a growing sentiment, mine included, that Google search isn't getting better. In fact, I feel it's markedly worse for many queries. The problem for me are all the blogspams out there. These -should- be easy to just punt, but alas, they do not. I'd gladly switch to any search that didn't show me such results.

I share the sentiment. Unfortunately it means other engines struggle even more, because they are all using roughly the same basket of techniques. I’m familiar with the claims that DDG and Brave serve equally good or better results.

An insightful breakthrough in quality that vastly reduces the computing and engineering required to serve great results that keep up with expanding information, similar to what Google did for search 20 years ago, would be wonderful, but it won’t come from DDG or Brave unless they can develop new models that completely replace their current search products.

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#32

It doesn't seem as good. My first search: what's the latest minecraft version Brave: 1.14.4 Google: 1.17 Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years. Second search: 白の意味 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? Google: Has a sn…

Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account.

On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is continuously degrading.

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd bet a big factor is that these spammy sites probably spend a lot of time on SEO - illuminating StackOverflow answers and official documentation don't.

I guess I’m surprised that it’s not possible to quickly deindex these spam farms and render their SEO spend a waste. Especially Google, I’m surprised they can’t detect and ban SEO rings more effectively.

I am surprised by this as well since Google is able to identify the origin of content (eg. Stackoverflow) and penalize sites for duplicating that content (or so they say). In my opinion it wouldn’t be difficult to identify the domains duplicating the content and penalize heavily. But, those sites are most likely displaying Google Ads so…

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will never catch up because Google is the only one dedicating enough engineering to match the growing amount of information, and their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results.

There is a growing sentiment, mine included, that Google search isn't getting better. In fact, I feel it's markedly worse for many queries. The problem for me are all the blogspams out there. These -should- be easy to just punt, but alas, they do not. I'd gladly switch to any search that didn't show me such results.

My growing disdain for Google isn’t even about their tech. In the beginning, Google’s SRP was an ad or two, followed by ~10 magically-relevant links. For some years they were praised for a restrained approach.

Today, the SRP is ads, the info box, the Reddit-cluster, the Quora-cluster, images, videos, “people also searched…”, “did you mean…”, and somewhere near the bottom a couple of those good ol’ fashioned links for old time sake.

Do not want.

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#35
post #7

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 function…

Well, I'd bet a big factor is that these spammy sites probably spend a lot of time on SEO - illuminating StackOverflow answers and official documentation don't.

True. If you search for any Python documentation the first links on Google are almost always geeksforgeeks, w3schools, etc instead of the official Python docs.

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#36

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. 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 makes Google a lot more useful than the alternatives is the vast amount of “widgets” they have.

For example when searching for a persons age, in shows up instantly in a large font on top. When searching for “champions league today”, you will get all soccer games for today neatly presented right inside of Google.

I haven’t seen another search engine that makes accessing this type of information this easy to access. And the sheer amount of widgets and engineering power behind them probably makes it harder to catch up to Google for the small players.

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#37
post #11
post #7

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 function…

DDG is awful for spam on most searches which can't be easily resolved with a Wikipedia info box. The 3rd result onward is very fishy, content spammy results of very low quality. It's like their algo isn't good enough to separate the wheat from the chaff yet.

DDG can give downright weird and irrelevant results, and sometimes (rarely) even returning with "noting matched your search". I hate it, but I have to fall back to Google quite often, and the results are consistently better; sometimes much better.

I still have DDG as the default because it does work a lot of the time, and because it's easy to turn a search in to a Google search with !g, but I have to admit it's not all that good in comparison :-( To be honest I'm not sure if I would keep it as the default if it didn't have !g, and that's not a good look for DDG :-/

(I appreciate this is a very hard problem btw, so not even intended as a dig at DDG; just my experience with it)

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#38
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.

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#39
post #30

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. I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all.

> I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all.

This would be ideal as Google Search has the best results for me. But I don't see it ever happening.

Although I'm sure many people would pay, it'd be a drop in the ocean compared to all people that wouldn't (and hard to justify dedicating resources to it when you're already making tons of money with the ad-supported free version).

Re: Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

#40

It doesn't seem as good. My first search: what's the latest minecraft version Brave: 1.14.4 Google: 1.17 Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years. Second search: 白の意味 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? Google: Has a sn…

Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account. On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is continuously degrading.

>Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account.

If anyone should be paying me it should be Brave for pointing out their weak spots.

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