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Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

brave.com

421–430 of 494 posts

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#421
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mostly deal with Hilton brand hotels for both work and our newish “hybrid digital nomad” lifestyle where we hop across cities in the US for 7 months a year. We stayed in Hilton brand hotels for around 160 days over the last year. You don’t get loyalty points and days don’t count toward status when booking through a third party. With Hilton, those loyalties points can account for 20%-35% toward future stays. Meaning…

It seems to make sense if you're going to use the same brand for a long time, yeah. I tend to stay wherever is cheapest so I haven't exploited loyalty schemes yet, but reading the comments I might be missing out.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#422
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your hotel double books you, they're out of rooms and can't help. If Booking.com double books you, they can pull strings to give you a different room in any hotel on their site (and they do). I don't doubt you had that experience personally, but it doesn't match my experience at all, and I spend 1/3 of my life in hotels.

So funny how this thread got nerd-sniped from Brave search to hotel booking.

I love the word nerd-sniped and indeed it applies to HN comments very often. We just want to bicker.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#423
post #221
post #26

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…

Just don't get Genius, or they won't do shit.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do they censor?

After the invasion of Ukraine they announced they would be removing sites "associated with Russian disinformation." They haven't provided a definition of what that includes. Lots of DDG users were upset because this is the type of thing they objected to with Google.

Check this out for DDG's explanation: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if the conservatives ever come back to power, this precedent that we are creating on justifying censorship will bit us hard, and it will hurt as hell.

Conservatives are still the status quo btw

It's kind of complicated. The old labels of right and left, conservative vs progressives, and socialist vs capitalists are clearly inadequate nowadays.

Class struggle based left has all but disappeared in the West. And whatever your point of view on American involvement in Ukraine, it is clear that at least the mainstream branches of both parties are largely in accord.

Trump's belligerence on China (justified or not, I am not discussing this) has not only been embraced by the Democrats and NeverТrumpers on the Republican side, but also has been extended far beyond pure economic war, flirting now with proper kinetic war.

Environmental issues, once a solid socialist banner, now have been enthusiastically embraced by Wall Street (I suspect, unfortunately, for not-so-noble reasons beyond banks salivating at the prospect of financing the green transition, and entrepreneurs dreaming about all the opportunities on rebuilding our infrastructure and replacing the entire automobile fleet. Not that is bad in itself, capitalism needs constant growth to be viable, and green rebuilding allows this to happen for a few more decades without utterly destroying our planet).

Civil rights also have been solidly co-opted by the oligarchic class. Both for reasons that the moral behavior and values of the elites are fairly advanced and they want to impose their values as the mainstream values down the throats of the more backward working class and because it is useful as it redirects energy from unionization and other forms of class struggle.

All of our labels and categories simply don't work to understand this complex scenario.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#426
post #8

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.

DDG probably doesn't want to? On the time horizons they're thinking about, it's probably more expensive to develop competitive tech and keep it working than it is to pay for API access.

The economics of scare tactics in mass advertising campaigns cant compete with those of writing actually good software.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#427
post #279
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I didn't downvote you, but I did notice that you are making repeated assertions about price disparity between direct and third party; multiple people are posting actual links and experiments showing you wrong; to which you more vehemently ("idiots") repeat the assertions (without evidence).

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#428
post #95
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they have 200 employees on linkedin, many of whom are not engineers. How they can carry two such major and complicated projects(browser and search) with such headcount?

search.marginalia.nu consisted of 1 Swedish engineer and 1 server last I heard and still managed to outclass DDG in a number of query types relevant to me. In fact, back when I used DDG I think I fell back to marginalia more often than I fell back to Google, partly because of my dislike for Google and partly because Google doesn't respect my queries - which of course is a contributing reason for my dislike for them.…

that niche engine looks like many magnitudes simpler problem than building competitive modern search.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#429
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody replies on the emails nowadays. You are lucky if the mobile number mentioned matches with Telegram, Whatsapp or whatever else, or it's phone call only. I'm talking about small to medium businesses - shops, hotels, restaurants etc.

"Nobody..." That's quite broad. How about some specific examples.

Small shops and small hotels in eastern Europe. I simply stopped trying to contact via email after several inquiries without any response. While messengers for some reason are very popular. If I already talking to someone in person and I need to send files to them then in 100% of cases they will ask to send it via some messenger. Latest cases - car insurance asked for photos, notary asked for my passport, legal consultant asked for my docs - all via messenger. No, wait, there was one case when I was asked to write an email (not a reply to email send to me, but I had to write first) by a hospital. Guess what - they didn't reply and I had to print and give them paper copies of the stuff I emailed previously.

Email is great, I use it at work all the time, internally in the company. But in the outside world it's just not working, unfortunately.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#430
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking.com has a higher chance for errors compared to hotels' direct bookings since its information is secondhand and unreliable. For the hotels with direct booking avenues, why use booking.com?

Because booking.com answers the question "where can I stay given place, date, and budget"? While direct access can only help you when you already know where are you going. The latter is fine if you travel to the same place many times, the former is more universal. As for reliability, I dunno, I used to travel a lot, and in my experience troubles mostly come with a particular destination, not with the method of bookin…

Research on OTA. Book direct.
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