561–570 of 571 posts
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I noticed the exact same thing there. Usually, when I don't get results I just append !g after the search terms, and google yields much better results. But what I'm most bothered by DDG nowadays is that on my phone the first 2-3 results (which on a phone basically means the whole visible area) are quite frequently ads.
It’s actually possible to switch off ads in the DuckDuckGo search settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
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've had the exact same experience and sharing the same doubts as well.
For programming related queries I'm going to Google 100% though, it understands the intent so much better. But for general queries I use Brave 90%+ of the time. But, it feels like I'm adding !g to the query more often than I used to in the beginning.
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…
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Yes! I swear I remember banning some of those spam domains in 2010 or so. IIRC, I thought it was part of Google search.
It definitely was. Sadly it was short-lived, it lasted maybe a year. I remember banning experts-exchange and being a lot happier.
Understandable since a few years later Google would acquire Doubleclick Inc, which back then was number one in polluting the web with advertising, and first entry in all adblockers kill lists.
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> Milking the browser...to fund its "mission", then laying off browser engineers and the Rust team to save money...Misleading people to think they suppprt [ sic ] Firefox when they donate to the foundation, then sending nothing to the browser and burning it all on "its mission" This is where they lost me as a donor. Mozilla can't go a month without launching a new idiot project. Do we know what fraction of their reve…
Mozilla literally can't win on HN or Reddit. People criticize them for taking money from Google and then when they try to monetize new ideas, they again get criticism. The Mozilla Foundation (where your donations go) is not the one launching these new ideas that you hate so much. If you are going to hate something, at least hate the right thing.
The strange thing is that it shouldn't even be a timing thing all that much, a bunch of SaaS apps were already running by 2015 and subscriptions were becoming a more normal thing. Even Office 365 had been a thing for five years at that point, Dropbox and Evernote for eight.
But I definitely remember the hatred, and I was one of the haters back then.
Maybe the difference is that the initial Firefox userbase came more from FOSS people where there's more of a purely altruistic expectation, while I at least approached new browsers more from an IT startup culture angle, wanting to support organizations that do good things more than hanging onto moralisms.
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I hear this criticism a lot and I always wonder whether that has something to do with either me not having a Google account and thus using the unpersonalized search, or simply with what I search for, but Google is almost always giving me worse results that DDG or, for that matter, any of the smaller competitors. Google seems to be filled with sponsored results that are only superficially relevant, and from page 2 onw…
I'm never logged in to Google, and don't even store cookies by default (although that may or may not be enough to prevent all tracking/personalisation, it's more than "the average" user and does seem to keep the worst out, not that personalisation is necessarily bad; the singular reason I have an account is because I actually like YouTube personalisation – without it I just get idiotic nonsense on the frontpage and n…
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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…
Why not use a real example instead of "Aple" (which returns what you expect: the stock for Apple Hospitality REIT)? Shouldn't be hard at all if this really is such a common problem.
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 really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything). neeva.com could do that for you for the price of a ~coffee ($4.95/month): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc2aTB24XmI
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…
Thank you for the feedback, Zestyping. If you wouldn't mind, can you tell me more about what makes the text hard to read? Is it the size, font-face, or color (or a combination of these)? Pro tip: If you aren't happy with the search results offered in Brave Search, and would prefer Google instead, perform the same search but with !g added to the end
The main problem is that Poppins is a display typeface, not a text typeface. It's not good for large blocks of small type, and in fact as I examine it more closely, it becomes obvious that it's a low-quality design.
Here are some of the problems I've noticed. I've annotated them here: https://imgur.com/a/8am9VJy
- The proportions are distorted, with some letters of excessively varying widths. Capitals like C, D, E, L, G are usually about the same size, but in Poppins, C, G and D are enormous while E and L are too narrow. You can do stuff like this to be cheeky, to have the type draw attention to itself in a display typeface; but a text typeface should aim to be legible, not flashy or distracting.
- Kerning is poor, with big irregular gaps between letters, especially after P and T.
- The lowercase e in particular is a problem. The middle bar is so thin that it almost disappears, and the tail comes so close that it almost closes the circle. You might think that a single letter can't mess up a whole design, but it's the most common letter in the English language. :)
- Hyphens are way off-center and parentheses are too tall, which just looks sloppy.
I discovered that you have entire pages of text set in Poppins on your website; these are actively painful to read! Like, just try to read the entire page and see if your eyes can tolerate reading all the way to the end, or try to count the number of times "search" appears in the text. Poppins has the silly, goofy personality of something for young children; it's hard to take seriously. It's named "Poppins" after all! And with all these quality issues to boot, pages like https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ just look unprofessional.
Do you have a designer on staff? Your designer should be able to explain all this to you and more, and to choose a more legible typeface for your body text. Pick something boring, like the system font on Macs, or Inter, Source Sans, Open Sans, Roboto, etc.
Hope this helps! If you run an A/B test, let me know how it goes.