Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 571 posts

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

#71

Post by DeathArrow »

leodriesch wrote: post #36
whoisjuan wrote: post #8

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 acces…

I think text search is what actually matters most. Image search, book search, maps, video search, widgets are just conveniences.

I don't actually look for the widgets or Wikipedia results.

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

#72

Post by DeathArrow »

1123581321 wrote: post #13
whoisjuan wrote: post #8

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.

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.

>their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results

The results are not relevant. Either the expectations are not very high, either they do a poor job.

They actually had better search results before using very sofisticated algorithms and trying to outsmart the users.

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

#73

Post by dukeofdoom »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #68
dukeofdoom wrote: post #65

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.

Joe is a magical thinker.

I'm not sure about that. What do you mean by that.

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

#75

Post by _tnyw »

cromwellian wrote: post #67
1_player wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tried your example both with and without quotes and I got Apple Hospitality which seems to be correct. Humans make so many typos that for the majority of people, autocorrecting is a net win.

I wish there was a mode for "do as I ask"

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

#76

Post by banana_giraffe »

1_player wrote: post #50
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…

The smartness gets me, especially with the image search. It used to be pretty useful.

Now Google seems to really want me to see what its ML model thinks is in the image. No, when I upload a picture of an actor, I'm not trying to search for pictures of "adult" or "man". Or, my recent favorite that had three people in the image, a suggested search for "sharing".

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

#77

Post by sanirank »

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.

Maybe the good folks at Apple, Mozilla, Brave or Opera could implement this feature in their browsers? They’re looking to increase their percent of browser use - it could encourage people to at least try switching over. Obviously would be popular among the HN crowd for developer documentation, but we could spread the news :)

On the downside I could see this being used by terrible people to delist actual information sources so that they would only ever be served conspiracy theory sites in their searches as well.

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

#78

Post by sverhagen »

ROARosen wrote: post #60
sverhagen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just add the following in your Google search box: -w3schools.com

I meant doing so without adding it to every search. But, hey, I clearly didn't have enough faith in humanity... not only am I now able to find some extensions to generally mess with my search queries, there's extensions freakin' DEDICATED to filtering out W3Schools!!!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=w3schools

(Edit: that doesn't mean I necessarily trust or recommend niche extensions like these.)

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

#79

Post by DeathArrow »

eloisius wrote: post #14
TheEnder8 wrote: post #4

This seems more like trying to capture money. If this was about privacy, they could have just gone with duckduckgo.

For all the love DDG gets on this site, it’s not really an independent search engine. It relies heavily on the Bing index, despite spinning it as using it as one of many signals. Brave has its own index and that puts it in another class. In my experience the results have been higher quality, too.

>Brave has its own index

Brave has Brendan Eich and that individual knows a thing or two about what matters in tech.

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

#80

Post by travisgriggs »

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! 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?
Post reply on HN