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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

#111

Post by rankun »

arp242 wrote: post #37
sph wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is awful for spam on most searches which can't be easily resolved with a Wikipedia info box. The 3rd result onward is very fishy, content spammy results of very low quality. It's like their algo isn't good enough to separate the wheat from the chaff yet.

DDG can give downright weird and irrelevant results, and sometimes (rarely) even returning with "noting matched your search". I hate it, but I have to fall back to Google quite often, and the results are consistently better; sometimes much better. I still have DDG as the default because it does work a lot of the time, and because it's easy to turn a search in to a Google search with !g, but I have to admit it's not a…

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 onwards, it sometimes feels like whatever it’s giving me isn’t related to my search at all. Even when I’m very specific with my query, using +/- and quoted phrases.

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

#112

Post by mattwad »

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…

This is really bad on Google too. I fixed it by installing an extension that lets me hide certain domains from results

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

#113

Post by petepete »

mattwad wrote: post #112
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…

This is really bad on Google too. I fixed it by installing an extension that lets me hide certain domains from results

This used to be a built in feature. Being able to block ExpertsExchange from all searches was incredibly useful. Now I'd do the same for Pinterest, W3Schools and apidock.com

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

#114

Post by 1_player »

sanirank wrote: post #77
eloisius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I’m surprised that it’s not possible to quickly deindex these spam farms and render their SEO spend a waste. Especially Google, I’m surprised they can’t detect and ban SEO rings more effectively.

Maybe the good folks at Apple, Mozilla, Brave or Opera could implement this feature in their browsers? They’re looking to increase their percent of browser use - it could encourage people to at least try switching over. Obviously would be popular among the HN crowd for developer documentation, but we could spread the news :) On the downside I could see this being used by terrible people to delist actual information s…

I don't think the first two companies you've mentioned care about making search better, as they're both getting a fat check from Google.

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

#115

Post by xapata »

skinkestek wrote: post #85
sverhagen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder maybe every other day if I could delist W3Schools, by maybe always adding a negating query aspect to the URL. But this all doesn't seem easily supported, when I looked at it. Yep, hating on W3Schools with a passion. Younger self shot himself too often in foot with W3Schools.

Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant. I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here? The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years is because for a large segment of users it works. And as someone else has pointed out the official documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online docs are close to worthl…

I can't speak for Java's docs, but Python's have good examples in the documentation that are not present in an IDE's tooltips. Further, there's often a handy link to the source code of the module.

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

#116

Post by seanhunter »

arp242 wrote: post #37
sph wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is awful for spam on most searches which can't be easily resolved with a Wikipedia info box. The 3rd result onward is very fishy, content spammy results of very low quality. It's like their algo isn't good enough to separate the wheat from the chaff yet.

DDG can give downright weird and irrelevant results, and sometimes (rarely) even returning with "noting matched your search". I hate it, but I have to fall back to Google quite often, and the results are consistently better; sometimes much better. I still have DDG as the default because it does work a lot of the time, and because it's easy to turn a search in to a Google search with !g, but I have to admit it's not a…

I have heard a few people say things like this, but I have been using ddg for years and I think I could count the number of times I got nothing back on the fingers of one hand, and those were times I was using incredibly specific search terms +"leprachaun eating marrow" +gif -funny or whatever (haven't tried that exact search but you get the idea).

Occasionally I try google search to check and I virtually never think google's results were better. But I'm guessing a lot of that is down to how you do search-fu, what you're actually looking for and subjective stuff about ranking quality.

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

#117

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Does it have a page two yet. When Brave search was launched and discussed on HN Brave search only had one page of search results. It was like five or ten results.

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

#118

Post by Kiro »

sverhagen wrote: post #102
skinkestek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant. I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here? The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years is because for a large segment of users it works. And as someone else has pointed out the official documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online docs are close to worthl…

My hate for W3Schools comes from the low quality of the content and the impression I get that their high ranking is only the result of SEO hacking. I respect the fact that there's a lot of _poor_ official documentation. But let's not supplant that with different _poor_ documentation.

The content is not low quality. It used to be pretty bad like 10 years ago but no more. I prefer W3Schools to MDN.

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

#119

Post by 1_player »

skinkestek wrote: post #85
sverhagen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder maybe every other day if I could delist W3Schools, by maybe always adding a negating query aspect to the URL. But this all doesn't seem easily supported, when I looked at it. Yep, hating on W3Schools with a passion. Younger self shot himself too often in foot with W3Schools.

Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant. I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here? The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years is because for a large segment of users it works. And as someone else has pointed out the official documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online docs are close to worthl…

Of all the spammy sites, w3schools is the least of my problems. I still find a use out of it when I need some very superficial information about, say, an HTML tag.

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

#120

Post by remus »

moralestapia wrote: post #32
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…

Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account. On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is continuously degrading.

> On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is continuously degrading.

Do you know of any publically available analysis that tries to measure search quality? And that shows that google's results are getting worse over time? It seems like a hard thing to measure, and a few people on HN saying "I searched for x and got garbage results" doesn't seem like the most robust thing.

Less flippantly, people are notoriously bad at objectively remembering stuff. I certainly have no idea how good google search results were even 1 week ago, let alone 1,2 or 3+ or years.

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