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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#291

Post by mbauman »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #263
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…

> I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand. Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different though. When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

> When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

This is exactly my experience. I have a "failed" search probably about a quarter of the time. Changing around the keywords can sometimes fix those failures... maybe about a quarter again are still stuck. So, yeah, ~5% failure rate. I inevitably try !g and am inevitably disappointed with effectively the same results (or lack thereof). Google successfully recovers a failed search maybe 10% of the time.

Re: Brave Search beta

#292

Post by simonw »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #199
AegirLeet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a browser with built-in cryptocurrency nonsense. That should tell you everything you need to know.

I have a few websites and receive payments from Brave Rewards almost every month. They pay me in BAT, but since I don't care about BAT or can use it directly, it gets converted to my local currency, which I then can use to pay for stuff. It's a mistake to assume something is nonsense or bad just because crypto is involved. Provided that you can convert it to something usable, it doesn't really matter if you're paid i…

How much are you earning? A few dollars a month or something more substantial?

Re: Brave Search beta

#293

Post by zeven7 »

azinman2 wrote: post #266
kbelder wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'anti-gay' stance was that he donated to a campaign for prop 8 in California; that preposition passed. So he was guilty of agreeing with the majority of voters in California. It's not that odious of a sin (and I disagree with Eich, incidentally). Should the majority of California citizens be canceled, permanently? Not allowed any leadership positions?

I'm not trying to re-litigate the past. But it was enough of a consequential donation back then to have removed from as CEO of Mozilla. So that's a pretty big deal. Somehow that has never made its way into anything related to Brave as far as I've noticed, and generally I've followed the company at least in terms of top HN links (always curious to see what people are doing in the browser space). I've never seen it men…

Every time Brave comes up on HN I search the comment section for "Eich" to see if this is still being mentioned. It always is. That's how I found your comment. You just haven't really been looking.

Re: Brave Search beta

#294

Post by tobr »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #263
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…

> I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand. Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different though. When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

I used to do this, but at some point I just stopped. Google is not better than DDG. More SEO spam and much more hostile UX.

Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX too so I don’t have any big hopes for this. I like the idea of paying for a search engine, though. I would seriously consider that if DDG offered it.

Re: Brave Search beta

#295

Post by azinman2 »

ketamine__ wrote: post #288
azinman2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> False. The reason for leaving Mozilla was never published. Well, then the timing is so aligned then at this point it's just occam's razor unless there's another explanation. > So your disappointed Hacker News isn't more engaged with identity politics and cancel culture? There's plenty of that. It's nearly daily now on HN. That wasn't my point at all. Just the inconsistency has always been apparent for years now so…

It's not a current news event. It's old news. Why are you so desperate to cancel him... again?

This is the last time I’ll mention this here as it’s getting not only repetitive but it feels like I’m the only one discussing in good faith:

1. I’m not trying to cancel anyone

2. I’m not trying to start a flame war

3. I haven’t actually stated any “sides” in this discussion at all

4. I’ve wondered about this for years now and hadn’t personally seen it brought up at all, thus prompting my question.

Sheesh.

Re: Brave Search beta

#296

Post by spullara »

lopatin wrote: post #102
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.

Since the brave search results are so thin, maybe put them on the right to be less confusing.

Re: Brave Search beta

#297

Post by solso »

Seirdy wrote: post #109
jonathansampson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Mixing with Google results only can happen after opt-in and only in Brave browser. You can see if a single query has been mixed clicking on the `Info`, or check the independence metrics on the `Settings` tab.

The fact that you see results similar to Google for popular queries is a by-product of the fact that our ranking is trained using anonymous query-log. There is plenty of references to the methodology (https://0x65.dev/).

The fact that we are similar to Google on certain types of queries, is good (at from the perspective of human assessment). It's easy to find other types of queries for which we are not similar to Google. It would be rather stupid if we were to "use google" on easy to solve queries but not on the complicated ones, don’t you think? In any case, very nice article besides a couple of miss-conceptions (like this one), will bookmark.

Disclaimer: work at Brave search, used to work at Cliqz

Re: Brave Search beta

#299

Post by [deleted] »

Nicksil wrote: post #181
lawl wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. In practice I've found their results to be basically identical to bing and other bing front-ends. What's not from bing are the widgets like weather, or dictionary definitions etc. So imo, "many sources, bing is just one" is misleading, as the main SERPs are pretty much straight up bing. (Note: I've used ddg as my main search engine for years)

>Not true. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... >In practice I've found their results to be basically identical to bing and other bing front-ends. This is anecdote. Countering my argument -- calling it misleading -- with anecdote doesn't work.

[deleted]

Re: Brave Search beta

#300

Post by ElijahLynn »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #263
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…

> I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand. Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different though. When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

It isn't acceptable, no. I tried Duck Search (aka Bing) for a couple weeks and in the beginning I wouldn't know that I wasn't getting the results I was looking for and eventually realized that the results just sucked compared to Google.

I found myself having to second guess the results and then did a Duck / Google hybrid for a while, going to Google when I didn't get what I was looking for and eventually it was too much friction. I equate it with when I used to use two different text editors, one for speed (Sublime) and another (IntelliJ)for step-debugging because Sublime didn't have that part well implemented and it was just maddening to have to switch back and forth all the time and learn/maintain two sets of keyboard shortcuts etc.

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