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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#101

Post by amoshi »

zzyzxd wrote: post #87
mrpf1ster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo allows you to do a Google search by prepending "!g" to any query. So usually I do that for the last 5% of queries that DDG fails on.

The frustration I am talking about is: Check query result -> realize the result is bad -> scroll back to the search bar -> place cursor at the beginning of the query -> enter "!g" -> redirect to Google.com It is not too bad on desktop, but doing it once on a smartphone is more than enough to push me to switch back to Google.

The !g can be almost anywhere in the query, it just can't be followed by non-whitespace or prefixed by special signs.

Re: Brave Search beta

#102

Post by lopatin »

zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine. I can't express how exciting this is to me. Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up changing the default search engine back to Google. I mean, DDG worked f…

Just curious, why are you opposed to search ads? They are already targeted by your search query, so don't fundamentally rely on tracking data.

Re: Brave Search beta

#103

Post by gnull »

zzyzxd wrote: post #87
mrpf1ster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo allows you to do a Google search by prepending "!g" to any query. So usually I do that for the last 5% of queries that DDG fails on.

The frustration I am talking about is: Check query result -> realize the result is bad -> scroll back to the search bar -> place cursor at the beginning of the query -> enter "!g" -> redirect to Google.com It is not too bad on desktop, but doing it once on a smartphone is more than enough to push me to switch back to Google.

If you use Tridactyl, you can quickly jump to the search bar with “gi”. That's what I do.

Re: Brave Search beta

#104

Post by judge2020 »

jonathansampson wrote: post #51
tnorthcutt wrote: post #25

Reminder that Brave has done some morally questionable things in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers... They've since corrected both of those things, but those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization.

You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; that isn't the case. Brave is designed in every way to preclude abuse from the design stage, and with a Can't Be Evil mindset, as opposed to the Don't Be Evil of Google. If you have questions about Brave, or Brave Search, we're always happy to chat. - 2018 Rewards Update documented at https://brave.com/rewards-update/ - Affiliate Codes explained at https://br…

> You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong;

They're not saying Brave did anything intentionally wrong, they're just big enough mistakes that it's not possible for them, personally, to trust the organization.

> those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization

Re: Brave Search beta

#105

Post by jonathansampson »

timvisee wrote: post #93

Why does this footer hide after the first page view? > Brave Search uses private usage metrics to estimate overall activity and performance. You can turn off this option in Settings.

Keeping the UI clean. A section and toggle exists for the feature immediately within the https://search.brave.com/settings page too.

Re: Brave Search beta

#106

Post by allyourhorses »

Based on the principles in the blog post alone ( https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ ), this will obviously be my new default search until it's proven sufficiently unusable.

DDG's usability has always been a bit of a problem for me, it feels more like a perl wrapper over some search bookmarks than an engine in its own right. Will give this one a go for a while, there is literally every reason to try and few reasons not to.

edit: holy crap Brave, c'mon, 13 CSS files and 15 JS files for the search result page? Cold cache case absolutely matters when you're trying to grow, sort it out!

Re: Brave Search beta

#107

Post by jonathansampson »

staticassertion wrote: post #23

Seems quite fast, good UX overall. I like that it gives me information like "all results from Brave" so that if they do fall back I know about it. DDG has a 'bang syntax' where I can do things like '!rust' to start searching the rust docs from my url - I like that a lot, I wonder if there's anything similar here or if I could work around that somehow.

Update: We do support !rust as well (and all of DDG's other bangs).

Brave Search supports many shebangs, but I don't believe we've added support for `!rust` yet (we do have `!mdn` and `!so` though). I'll submit a request to add a `!rust` option too!

Re: Brave Search beta

#109

Post by Seirdy »

jonathansampson wrote: post #35
colesantiago wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still wouldn't use it since it falls back to Bing or Google.

You're referring to Fallback Mixing , which is off by default. You have to enable it in https://search.brave.com/settings . When enabled, this feature will (at times) pull in results from Google via an anonymous query, routed through the browser. Read more about it here: https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback

This has not been my experience. Comparing results with Google, Startpage, and a Searx instance with only Google enabled reveals that the results are almost always from Google. Sometimes they merge multiple results that share a domain.

I decided to add them to the "Semi-Independent" category of my collection of indexing search engines: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

Re: Brave Search beta

#110

Post by bsclifton »

vlunkr wrote: post #81

I really don't understand Brave. What special thing do they offer that people actually want? The main concrete selling point seems to built-in ad blockers, but we've had that for ages in every other browser. They have some crypto stuff going on, I'll be honest, I don't understand it, because I don't care, I just want to browse the web. That should be possible without a blockchain. They claim performance is better, bu…

Have you given it a try? The crypto-currency parts are optional (you have to actually enable them). Brave has got a solid adblocker and privacy features out of the box
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