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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

#151

Post by y4mi »

charcircuit wrote: post #62
cyberpsybin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google" "private"; unbelievable someone can put these two words in same sentence. Google cannot even pull pages older than 10yrs old at the moment.

Google cares a lot about protecting user's privacy. Take a look at their privacy policy. For example, what other API provider requires you to get security audits ($15k-$75k yearly) when handling sensitive user data.

i think a lot of people never really understood googles business model.

google absolutely wants to protect their users privacy from third parties. their ideal situation would be if they're the only one's knowing everything about their users so they can allow third parties to advertise things to their users. if they'd leak any of this information, they'd be compromising their main business model.

so yes, people can trust google to do their everything to keep their information from reaching anyone else, including forcing said third parties to undergo paid audits to verify that nobody is leeching their user data.

for some reason, a lot of people got it into their head that google literally sells information. i'm not sure why this ever started, as - at least as far as i am aware - google never tried to do anything even remotely like that

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

#152

Post by kccqzy »

p-e-w wrote: post #144
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 don't understand why search engines don't fight SEO spam using simple, hardcoded rules for specific keywords. Surely, something like "if the search string contains the word 'python', rank results from 'python.org' above everything else" can't be difficult to implement? Granted, it's not a silver bullet for search engine spam in general, but even a few dozen rules like that would dramatically improve the quality of…

I hate it to say it, but for CS beginners python.org isn't a good resource: it's simply too technical. Even for motivated students it will take them at least a few months of learning from a more beginner-friendly resource before the official docs on python.org make sense.

That's not to mention the multitude of other materials on python.org other than the docs, like PEPs, pypi (third party libraries), bug reports, etc. Can you imagine a student searching for how to use a Python feature, but found a PEP illustrating the design of that language feature?

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

#154

Post by seqastian »

p-e-w wrote: post #145
topbanana wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial pressure seems the most likely to me

How would such "pressure" look in practice? Seems to me that every industry on the planet is at Google's mercy, not the other way round.

How many google ads are on github or stack overflow compared to the other pages you find? They know exactly what every little change to the algorithm does to their bottom line.

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

#155

Post by vadfa »

0x49d1 wrote: post #146

Unfortunately can't use it: I'm on my private VPN almost all the time (need it for work). VPN is hosted as OpenVPN service on German Digital Ocean server to have static public IP. The VPN is mine only (sure IP is not), I'm the only person who uses it. Brave Search shows error on accessing: https://ibb.co/72L3mc5 . Other search engines open without problems. Turning off VPN helps, but I don't really understand why my…

It seems normal to me that they only want access from residential IP blocks.

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

#156

Post by fastball »

zeronine wrote: post #21
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".

brave shilling is concerningly effective

Yeah, I'm honestly flabbergasted that people like using a browser that has the performance of Chromium without the Google, a thorough / very performant ad-blocker built-in, and some totally optional next-gen features that many people like.

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

#157

Post by soco »

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.

I can imagine it was also a handy tool to DoS a site.

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

#158

Post by 0x49d1 »

vadfa wrote: post #155
0x49d1 wrote: post #146

Unfortunately can't use it: I'm on my private VPN almost all the time (need it for work). VPN is hosted as OpenVPN service on German Digital Ocean server to have static public IP. The VPN is mine only (sure IP is not), I'm the only person who uses it. Brave Search shows error on accessing: https://ibb.co/72L3mc5 . Other search engines open without problems. Turning off VPN helps, but I don't really understand why my…

It seems normal to me that they only want access from residential IP blocks.

Ok, but others are not restricting such behavior, so this one is a restriction for me. They can decide whether traffic is an organic search at least checking if I rush their page with the rate of 100 requests per second or smth similar. For me this is a downside that I'm restricted in usage of "public" resource.

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

#159

Post by marginalia_nu »

tommica wrote: post #87
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 remember reading in HN an idea about allowing people to customize the weights used to filter search results - a search engine that provided that, where I could use some curated configuration file. Maybe I could have profiles like "cooking", "programming", "news" and help the search engine even better to understand my intent. Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into g…

This is actually doable. There's a tweak to PageRank you can do (that's as old as the original paper[1]) that allows you to bias the ranking toward a certain set of websites. It works really well.

While it's probably unfeasible (or at least really expensive) to do completely personalized rankings, that's just too much data, but segmenting off into areas like academia, blogosphere, tech, etc. is quite doable, and as the authors remark, this approach is highly resilient to manipulation from commercial interests.

[1] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf

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

#160

Post by soco »

jb1991 wrote: post #49
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.

I also noticed that, if DDG doesn't find it in my initial search, there's no way on earth I could game the search terms to actually find it. So if my first 1-2 searches give nothing I just add the !g...
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