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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

#41

Post by leodriesch »

zestyping wrote: post #18

Does anyone else find the font choice in Brave Search to be an obstacle for them? I just find it so hard to read. 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 wa…

+1. I think they use Poppins, which IMO is one of the most overused Google fonts and also more of a display font.

I don’t know why they couldn’t use something more optimized for reading small characters like Inter or just use the system font stack.

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

#42

Post by decrypt »

DeathArrow wrote: post #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.

I haven't used Google for many years, so I can't speak to whether it shows personalized results today. But, I recently switched to Whoogle Search (https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search) which shows Google results but without the tracking. I am happy with it, that I have completely ditched DuckDuckGo in favor of it.

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

#43

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

thestepafter wrote: post #33
eloisius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just wish I could configure google to not show certain domains such as W3schools without adding a complex search query or installing plugins

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

#44

Post by decrypt »

nabaraz wrote: 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.

About the tracking part, you may like to check Whoogle Search - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search It's Google results without the tracking, and it can be self-hosted.

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

#45

Post by perihelions »

zestyping wrote: post #18

Does anyone else find the font choice in Brave Search to be an obstacle for them? I just find it so hard to read. 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 wa…

If you're using uBlock, you can one-click block remote font loading from a domain in the badge popup menu (or write custom rules using the no-remote-fonts: or *$font syntax). This will force a fallback to system fonts, which should be perfectly fine.

This hardly the "best" solution, but, everyone has uBlock installed, and it's literally a 5-second hack.

With pictures: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

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

#46

Post by gandalfgreybeer »

moralestapia wrote: post #32
charcircuit wrote: post #28

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.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me being worse at using keywords to search for what I need but I’ve noticed that it’s so much harder to find things that are actually helpful via google on stackoverflow etc.

Most annoying thing is when I restrict keywords and they still show up on the search results.

Now when I can’t find something on Google, instead of refining keywords, I give DDG or Bing a go first (both not always successful but half the time I find more useful links).

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

#47

Post by sverhagen »

eloisius wrote: 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…

I wonder maybe every other day if I could delist W3Schools, by maybe always adding a negating query aspect to the URL. But this all doesn't seem easily supported, when I looked at it. Yep, hating on W3Schools with a passion. Younger self shot himself too often in foot with W3Schools.

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

#48

Post by heavyset_go »

eloisius wrote: post #27
suddenexample wrote: post #20

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.

Google did it with a lot of health blog spam that had low quality and false info but a ton of referral links. It takes a lot of bad publicity for them to act, though.

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

#49

Post by jb1991 »

eloisius wrote: 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…

I have personally found that when searching for developer documentation, as you mentioned, unfortunately nothing beats Google. I can always find what I’m looking for very quickly. But when I try DuckDuckGo, it’s a mess of irrelevant or weak pages.

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

#50

Post by 1_player »

DeathArrow wrote: post #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.

I hate how smart it tries to be.

Sometimes you need to search an intentional misspelling, say, "Aple" (just an example), Google will helpfully try to correct you with "did you mean Apple?", and even if you put the word in quotes you still get results for Apple, not my intentionally misspelled search. Listen to what I'm trying to tell you, dumb machine.

They've tweaked it so it only respond to what it thinks you want to search, not what you've asked of it, and there's no way around it.

Computers are so much better when they take your input literally.

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