Live data from Hacker News

Brave Search beta

search.brave.com

381–390 of 697 posts

Re: Brave Search beta

#381
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along these lines I use ddg’s bangs for the same benefit. So many searches for Python help are filled with very shallow intros on tutorial sites of varying quality with the official docs rarely the first result. Now I just prefix my query with !py and I’m immediately taken to the docs.

Brave Search supports !bangs ;)

Indeed, including nearly all of DDG's !bangs :) We also add in some others, such as !so for StackOverflow, !gh for GitHub, and !mdn for the Mozilla Developer Network.

Re: Brave Search beta

#382
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startpage is owned by an adtech company now.

that doesn't change the fact that there are no trackers and the fact that it uses Google results

No, but it does mean that you are likely to use it without knowing when they do start tracking you. Because of course an adtech company will (and of course they will deny until the day they change it).

Re: Brave Search beta

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shebang specifically refers to using an exclamation point to define where data should be directed. Same as it is in Bash scripts, just a different context and slightly different syntax.

> In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark (#!) at the beginning of a script. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix) The word "shebang" has different uses outside of computing, but I can't find any use of the word that refers to a ! without a #

Note the (Unix) part of the Wikipedia URL. This is an entirely different context.

Re: Brave Search beta

#384
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can you elaborate on how you feel "Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX"? You're not talking about the first version of the User Tipping feature from 2018 (where Brave gave BAT to its users and asked them to give mark which creator(s) they'd like to support) are you?

Re: Brave Search beta

#385

> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting". Brave is just a "pop-priv…

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Their attitude towards advertisement and cryptocurrency is the reddest flag imaginable.

Re: Brave Search beta

#386
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX

Yep. The missteps that they've made over the past few years do not give me any confidence in the future of the project.

Re: Brave Search beta

#387
I tired some programmers searches and some that has caused controversy in other search engines (like "easiest way to suicide") and I'm sorry to say I get 100% the same results as I do from Bing. At most there are widgets (like DDG) and maybe swapped a place or two in the top 5 results as a difference. I can't see any indication of their own indexing at all.

Re: Brave Search beta

#388
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that doesn't change the fact that there are no trackers and the fact that it uses Google results

No, but it does mean that you are likely to use it without knowing when they do start tracking you. Because of course an adtech company will (and of course they will deny until the day they change it).

> Because of course an adtech company will

then it seems they're being quite slow, since the acquisition happened almost 2 years ago.

Re: Brave Search beta

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But which is more accurate google or bing? Having used DDG (~bing) for a few years now, at first I felt it was inferior, but I stuck with it for the privacy. Now I feel it's roughly equal, depending on the query. Google is full of spammy SEO content, where as DDG elevates niche content (probably more because it's not targeted by SEO spam, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt) I feel it's somewhat impossible to…

> Now I feel it's roughly equal, depending on the query As someone who is trying to switch to DDG for the 10th time, I really wish I felt this way. My experience is so different. Right now I’m at the “g! Everything” stage. Which comes right before the “give up and just switch back to google” stage. DDG results are seriously so bad. It baffles me. I really want to remove google completely from my life. Search and YouT…

Have you tried Searx[0]? It's the privacy nuclear-option, and supposedly gets better results than DDG or Google (if not, don't shoot me: i'm just the messenger)

[0] https://searx.space

Re: Brave Search beta

#390
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how their posts show such a different approach to their browser than Braves. E.g. forking Firefox not Chromium, implementing functionality as extension instead of in browser where possible...

> If all browsers end up using Blink (Google), the Web will suffer as developers will only optimize and test for the Blink rendering engine. Am I the only one that thinks that this would be a good thing? Like the entire industry sharing the same core open source technology? Write a website once and it works perfectly across all platforms?

You surely are too young to remember the IE6 shithole monopoly we were all in when - MOZILLA - ALONE saved us.

It's not that having a common rendering engine for everyone would be bad. What's bad is having 1 company (or a few) for-profit companies controlling that rendering engine.

They don't give a shit about you!

Post reply on HN