281–290 of 494 posts
I've set Brave Search to be my default search engine for private windows (incognito mode). I've grown annoyed by the cookie consent dialogs and captchas that are presented to me by Google when I open Google's search engine in a private window. Brave Search doesn't have those annoyances.
It lands you on Brave Search instead of what you have set for your regular sessions.
Fine by me.
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If you’re booked 3rd party you’re much more likely to be the one bumped I. The first place. You’re also likely to get the least desireable rooms on the least desireable floors.
People say that but it doesn't ring true in my experience. Let's face it, you're just paying more for the same service if you book directly.
Booking.com was zero help at all when I called them. None. They couldn't find or book me another hotel, and basically just told me that there was nothing they could do besides refund my money.
There are many, many stories like this.
Don't get me wrong, I actually like Booking. I think it's a great way for smaller properties to get visibility without having to build and maintain that web presence themselves. But when it goes wrong, don't expect them to go to bat for you. They are incentivized to keep making money, and threatening to delist hotels for fucking over customers when the hotel clearly messed up is clearly not a game they have decided to play.
I always book directly with the hotel if I can, because, if you do that, the shit that I mentioned just doesn't happen. Sure, if it's double the price, I'll roll the dice with Booking. But it basically never is. If it's something like 5-10% of the nightly price extra, I'll pay that premium to not have to deal with any BS. Usually it's the exact same price anyway, if it's an available option (there are some hotels that literally only survive via Booking these days).
Are there any details about how they're crawling the web? I've never encountered the BraveBot User-Agent and never heard of such crawler.
What percentage of it, I have no idea.
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
Just started testing Brave Search, and it scored a rare 100 on the first test: If you type in the name of a favorite boutique hotel, will you get that hotel's true website -- or the usual hairball of third-party intermediaries? (For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Book…
> (For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.) That's utterly backwards IME. On Booking.com, most modifications are the push of a button (that, crucially, is right there in the UI that I already kn…
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I've heard booking.com forbids them to charge first-party customers less than the booking.com price, and the hotel is beholden to the site for income so they play along. The only people booking directly are basically idiots, so for those people they charge as much as they can. In the UK there are large chains such as Travelodge who have pulled out from booking.com entirely and made people go to their site.
And yes downvote me but maybe think about whether spending more money going to first-party sites is actually serving you?
But, sure, I'm obviously an idiot! I'm just over here drooling stupidly while I get better and/or cheaper hotel rooms.
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"politics" is one way to describe him donating a large sum of money to a bigoted anti-gay cause and losing the trust of his employees.
Yeah, but ... It was a political effort. It was a movement that used the existing mechanism to promote a law they wanted, not a mob trying to get their way by shouting down others. You may not like how the process works, but it works the same for everyone. Trying to smear the ones you don't agree with as not legitimate doesn't work, because it's the process that you're smearing.
It sounds like your biggest priority in determining ethicality is legality: did anything illegal happen in the "cancellation" of the Brave founder? (I know nothing about this event, I'm just commenting within the context of this short conversation).
If not, how then are you determining one method being better than another?
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As an early adopter, I reluctantly cancelled my Kagi plan today. It’s a great search engine, but even while just restricting it to one of my desktop machines and not using it on mobile at all, I ran up against the search limit with 10 days to go before renewal.
There is no search limit on Kagi. Do you mean you were not comfortable to pay 1.5 cents per search?
To be fair this is why the $25 plan exists but if the economics are to be believed is totally unsustainable. For me 1.5¢/search is a really awkward spot. Fixed cost unlimited and GPT cheap pricing of $0.000002/token hit "use without thinking" status but at 1.5/2.5¢ I could actually rack up a rather large bill by accident so it causes me to use the service less.
How is it that Brave managed to build an indexer and remove dependence on Bing in less than two years but DuckDuckGo hasn't been able to do it in a decade.