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

This seems somewhat natural, at least to me.

Imagine you're talking to your friend, and you say the exact same thing you tell Google: "North Korea DHL". They're not going to have any idea what you're talking about (they can guess) - do you want to ship something there? Are you making a comment/observation? A business opportunity? Your friend would probably ask clarifying questions to narrow down what you're talking about, or you would be more specific upfront.

Computers don't magically read your mind nor they know your intent. Adding quotes to search and other 'advanced' techniques are the equivalent of adding context to a conversation.

Personally I have rarely experienced what you have, and when I do it's usually for specific international queries (like searching for a Belgian slang word from Google US) which isn't an issue if you use the correct locale/language for what you're searching for. Obviously it's not perfect, I'm just surprised by your anecdote in the absence of a real example.

Hostility towards users asking questions as seen in the tabstrip API bug. (A really simple thing that I fix on a weekly basis in 4 minutes every time I restart Firefox but somehow next to impossible for Mozilla. Although I should admit they are making it harder and harder for me as well.)

Pushing Pocket (which is nice and could have become a nice source of income from users like me who wants to support the browser) in a dishonest way and as a built in part of Firefox instead of an extension that people could remove, saying there were no ties when there definitely was.

Almost scaring the crap out of a number of the more careful ones of us when they installed a "I, Robot extension" or something without any warning.

Milking the browser part of the system dry to fund its "mission", then laying off browser engineers and the Rust team to save money.

Pretending to be a community when fundraising, but a dictator when making decisions.

Misleading people to think they suppprt Firefox when they donate to the foundation, then sending nothing to the browser and burning it all on "its mission".

Definitely agree. My experience with Google lately is like this:

- I search for keywords A B C D - I get 4 irrelevant text ads - First result is relevant and contains all keywords - "Other related searches" - Then a list of results than omit A, B, C or D ("include A?"), or even omit multiple keywords, removing any sense in the query

And the whole time I feel like I'm being pushed around to buy something. It's becoming unbearable. I'm pretty sure Google is optimizing for more ad impressions at this point to burn through adsense credits asap...

On new android devices in Europe, google was forced to let users select their preferred search engine from a randomized list of the 5-6 most popular options in that country. This could definitely come to browsers at some point. But then it's probably a death sentence to Firefox who needs to set Google as its search provider to survive.

That's only really useful for anthropologists though.