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

131–140 of 571 posts

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

#131

Post by Abimelex »

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…

> Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc.

I have the same feeling, but using Google ;)

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

#132

Post by Kiro »

perihelions wrote: post #45
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-s…

> everyone has uBlock installed

I don't know anyone using uBlock. I know a few using AdBlock but that's it.

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

#133

Post by input_sh »

devwastaken wrote: post #6

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. 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".

> Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled

You mean like this? https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

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

#134

Post by mrtksn »

Kiro wrote: post #125
mrtksn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every NLP AI is like that, it’s like trying to make a mentally challenged person do something for you and you have to correct them for something extremely simple and it is frustrating. Yes, Google, I did not type North Korea DHL by accident. I really mean the odd one because I’m curious if they have DHL but I really don’t feel like explaining it to you. Could you please simply don’t assume stuff by default? I appreci…

I only get relevant results such as "Does DHL deliver to North Korea?" and "DHL establishes operation in North Korea". Do you have a better example actually illustrating this?

This time it returned relevant result for me too, I recall getting annoyed by it some time ago so maybe its not relevant example anymore.

Anyway, it happens all the time. Goole assumes that I mean something and I need to quote words trying to enforce my query. Pretty much every time when the returned results don't include the words I typed is a frustration for me. It makes it very hard to fix the query because I need to study every result instead of having no results or obviously low quality results.

It's especially hard when I'm not well versed in the subject, so I need to go through the results only to realize that these results are not about the thing I'm looking for.

BTW, I do less Googling these days. I would usually search Reddit, HN and StackOverflow directly from their websites as the search results would be from the expected domain and not too smart but just enough smart to correct typos etc. Also the filters work better.

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

#135

Post by vincent_s »

gremIin wrote: post #93
gandalfgreybeer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not you. Google nerfed search a few years ago. I noticed exactly what you noticed around 2016 or so.

Amit Singhal, who was Head of Search at Google until 2016, has always emphasized that Google will not use artificial intelligence for ranking search results. The reason he gave was that AI algorithms work like a black box and that it is infeasible to improve them incrementally. Then in 2016, John Giannandrea, an AI expert, took over. Since then, Google has increasingly relied on AI algorithms, which seem to work well enough for main-stream search queries. For highly specific search queries made by power users, however, these algorithms often fail to deliver useful results. My guess is that it is technically very difficult to adapt these new AI algorithms so that they also work well for that type of search queries.

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

#137

Post by vincent_s »

DeathArrow wrote: post #55
decrypt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is also startpage.com, which gives you Google search results but with privacy. But my problem is finding relevant information.

Startpage is now owned by an advertising company [1]

[1] https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

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

#138

Post by KronisLV »

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…

How would you say that the Brave Browser and Brave Search compare with something like Firefox and DuckDuckGo (plus a plugin, like uBlock Origins), if you've used those?

Anyone else care to comment? Personally, i'm still someone that's used more to Firefox and is more familiar with Mozilla due to them having been around for longer, but their recent decisions might make some people reconsider their choices and look into exploring new options.

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

#139

Post by topbanana »

occamrazor wrote: post #127
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…

Some years ago Google had the option to remove a website from search results. After a few months they discontinued. It would be nice to know why, if the user adoption was too low, the computational cost too high, or the user experience too bad because users inadvertently removed good results.

Commercial pressure seems the most likely to me

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN