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Brave Search launches own image and video search

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Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#31
post #22
post #2

I'm very glad for this! I've been using Brave search almost since it launched, and the standard results have gotten great, but it's always been a bummer to have to go out to Bing/Google for images/video. It's really nice having an alternative that isn't just wrapper around someone else's search index.

i have been using brave search for a while now and i was surprised and am very satisfied with the search results. missing image and video search was a bit annoying mostly in that it linked to google and bing but not any other search engines. but i just remembered to switch to where i wanted to do image search instead. it sometimes meant that i had to go back to retype my search query, but i'd rather have a good text…

I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations. I've been using Brave as a default for 1y+ and I still get consistently bad results compared to Google. The only reason it's remotely competitive is how much Google itself has declined in quality.

A recent example from my search history, "doors of stone release date". The author has announced a new novella releasing Nov. 2023, but not the actual book Doors of Stone. The google infobox gets this wrong, but the first result is correct. Brave accidentally gets it right that there's no release date for the book, but misses the novella announcement and all but one of the results are blogspam.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#32
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context... well, bing hiding the tiananmen square protests (mentioned in the article) or google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" are two incidents that come to mind.

> google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" There's no way that's intentional. For starters, DuckDuckGo, Google and Brave image search all do the same thing here. Maybe it's some weirdness involving "american inventors" appearing in the phrase "african american inventors" or something.

Couple of google tests:

“Black man” “Black family” Results as expected.

“White man” “White family” A mixture of black and white.

“happy black woman” Results as expected.

“happy white woman” Lots of white women with black men.

Edit: DDG’s results seems to fair better.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#33
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context... well, bing hiding the tiananmen square protests (mentioned in the article) or google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" are two incidents that come to mind.

> google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" There's no way that's intentional. For starters, DuckDuckGo, Google and Brave image search all do the same thing here. Maybe it's some weirdness involving "american inventors" appearing in the phrase "african american inventors" or something.

Agreed, I do believe it's an artifact of a anglophone dominated web (if you're talking about someone from your country with your native language, you're less likely to specify their nationality). I didn't mean to be toxic with the dominated part or anything, I just think it summarises the phenomena pretty well.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#34
As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search engines on the web:

    Baidu
    Bing
    Brave
    Google
    Yandex
You can compare their results on this search comparison page I maintain:

https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1

(If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and Pexels, click on "more engines" to select all places you want to search)

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see they say "if a domain or page is not crawlable by any search engine (it has a noindex tag), or if it is not crawlable by googlebot, then Brave Search’s bot will not crawl it either." 1: https://brave.com/search/api/

What if I want googlebot to crawl it but not bravebot? Every other search engine lets me block its crawler specifically. Only Brave has this shady policy.

I'm conflicted - I see your point and agree; though I appreciate that by using methods of others... we don't end up with more

Loosely related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#36
post #32
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" There's no way that's intentional. For starters, DuckDuckGo, Google and Brave image search all do the same thing here. Maybe it's some weirdness involving "american inventors" appearing in the phrase "african american inventors" or something.

Couple of google tests: “Black man” “Black family” Results as expected. “White man” “White family” A mixture of black and white. “happy black woman” Results as expected. “happy white woman” Lots of white women with black men. Edit: DDG’s results seems to fair better.

Can't reproduce these results.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#38
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have been using brave search for a while now and i was surprised and am very satisfied with the search results. missing image and video search was a bit annoying mostly in that it linked to google and bing but not any other search engines. but i just remembered to switch to where i wanted to do image search instead. it sometimes meant that i had to go back to retype my search query, but i'd rather have a good text…

I'm a little surprised to hear other people having such good results. Brave search was my default for quite a while, until a few weeks after they got rid of bing results. As soon as that happened, stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be there, and 90% of the time I'd follow up searches with !g or !ddg just to get something decent to show up. The index just felt severely lacking, or the relevancy was pretty…

Possibly, at least for my own experience. It's much less often that I rerun a search with !g. Brave Search's results are becoming more relevant to my own queries, and Google's becoming less so. Not to mention how ads like to masquerade as ordinary Google results; using Google is starting to feel less comfortable.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#39
post #36
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple of google tests: “Black man” “Black family” Results as expected. “White man” “White family” A mixture of black and white. “happy black woman” Results as expected. “happy white woman” Lots of white women with black men. Edit: DDG’s results seems to fair better.

Can't reproduce these results.

You don't see this? https://i.imgur.com/e5GaIgn.jpeg

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#40
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have been using brave search for a while now and i was surprised and am very satisfied with the search results. missing image and video search was a bit annoying mostly in that it linked to google and bing but not any other search engines. but i just remembered to switch to where i wanted to do image search instead. it sometimes meant that i had to go back to retype my search query, but i'd rather have a good text…

I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations. I've been using Brave as a default for 1y+ and I still get consistently bad results compared to Google. The only reason it's remotely competitive is how much Google itself has declined in quality. A recent example from my search history, "doors of stone release date". The author has announced a new novella releasing Nov. 2023, but not the actual book Door…

>I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations.

The difference might be that they (including myself) don't ask search engines for facts like "doors of stone release date". They'll search for "doors of stone", find personally reliable sources like Wikipedia, Fandom, Goodreads, browse them and decide on an answer. When sources fail to appear, they'll either refine the search (like "doors of stone rothfuss") or call it a failure and maybe try a different search engine.

This is one the reasons why Brave has been good for me so far. When a relevant Wikipedia article exists, it shows it, even if the title doesn't match. Whereas lately DDG and others don't. In fact, you can see this with "doors of stone". Brave shows "The Kingkiller Chronicle", DDG doesn't at all, Google has it low down in the results.

It also shows Reddit discussions without needing to explicitly filter for it. And I use ad block to remove the AI summariser that takes up half the screen, it's not what I want from a search engine.

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