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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

#201

Post by rglullis »

AegirLeet wrote: post #180
fastball wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no "Chromium without the Google". Chromium/Blink is made by Google. By using a browser built on Chromium/Blink, you are actively supporting Google's browser engine hegemony.

The browser is not just the engine and the "browser engine hegemony" is not what really matters.

What matters is that Google does not establish a position where it can use its browser to dictate the direction of the whole web in favor of its business.

Chromium or not, Brave was never forced to adopt the changes in the extension manifest (which would block some ad-blocking and tracking mechanisms). They also never were forced to implement FLOC, they have their own policy regarding third-party cookies, etc, etc.

Sure it would be better if we had diversity and more choices in all different layers, but if you think about it the more companies use Chromium to create browsers that take the web in a different direction from what Google wants, the more Google gets judo-ed out of its dominance.

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

#202

Post by schleck8 »

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My first search: what's the latest minecraft version Brave: 1.14.4 Google: 1.17 Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years.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…

I agree that the quality isn't comparable yet, but don't forget that this is barely out of beta and that google had decades to imprpve their product.

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

#203

Post by jb1991 »

soco wrote: post #160
jb1991 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I’ve learned just cut out the entire exploratory first couple of steps and just always use !g when searching for anything developer related.

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

#205

Post by eloisius »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #163
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 doubt it would do much good to have a ban list. An entire industry is singularly focused on gaming search engines to promote whatever. It just so happens that blogspam sites are incredibly profitable in aggregate.

It still seems like such a simple technical problem to solve, albeit at large scale. Particular URL is blatant spam? Delist it. Keeps popping up on new URLs? Threaten to delist the hosting provider's address block. I'm more inclined to think that the reason these problems aren't solved is because there's little incentive to do it. The more time you spend milling around looking for what you're looking for, the more opportunities there are to show you ads.

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

#206

Post by Kiro »

I usually use something like "My Public IPv4 is" to see what IP address is in the index to derive what provider a search engine is using.

However, Brave Search apparently does not even allow hard quotes and gives me random stuff related to IPv4. People keep saying that Google doesn't respect what you enter but for this query Google is the only one respecting it. DDG starts out with a few results matching it exactly but then goes off the rails with random results.

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

#207

Post by dpq »

didibus wrote: post #199
jeroenhd wrote: post #195

You know what, I welcome a new search provider, even if it's by a cryptocurrency company. I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo. What I don't see is where Brave gets its image search results from. After Microsoft blatantly started serving the CCP by blocking queries for "tank man", which as far as I know they've never actually apologised for, just explained it…

I thought Yandex also used Bing for image search? Ya when I do image search in Yandex at the bottom it says Search: Bing Google

I think they stopped doing it long time ago (and I cannot see these links now), but if my memory serves me well basically these links were taking you to Google and Bing with the same query, respectively. I.e. they were directly linking to competitors, just in case your original search at Yandex was not satisfactory.

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

#208

Post by xNeil »

AegirLeet wrote: post #180
fastball wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no "Chromium without the Google". Chromium/Blink is made by Google. By using a browser built on Chromium/Blink, you are actively supporting Google's browser engine hegemony.

It seems Brave tones down or deals with most of the creepy stuff in Chromium. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

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

#209

Post by _fnhr »

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…

Here is one example in Brave's favour, seach: politics influences the science of covid-19

Brave - first result.

Google - no first page, no second page, no third page, stopped checking.

Let's try that in quotes - it's the exact title of the article: "politics influences the science of covid-19"

Brave: first result

Google: no results found, searching without quotes.

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

#210

Post by rglullis »

jeroenhd wrote: post #195

You know what, I welcome a new search provider, even if it's by a cryptocurrency company. I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo. What I don't see is where Brave gets its image search results from. After Microsoft blatantly started serving the CCP by blocking queries for "tank man", which as far as I know they've never actually apologised for, just explained it…

Brave has bought a search company that became what is now "Brave Search". They are using their own index.

The "third-parties" bit, IIUIC, is the part when their index does not give good results and it falls back to working like startpage: they send the anonymized query to Google/Bing and take the results to send to the user. I believe that the idea is that they can use this as a way to improve their own index.

They also show on the results page how much of the results are coming from them vs from third-parties [0]

[0]: https://search.brave.com/help/independence

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