If they add bang operators, I might trial switching over from ddg.
Brave Search beta
41–50 of 697 posts
Re: Brave Search beta
#42It seems there is telemetry, sending the day, OS and browser type (among other things I cannot identify) by POST:
https://archive.is/0NTrt
It seems it can be disabled in the settings (https://search.brave.com/settings) but it's opt-out rather than opt-in.
Re: Brave Search beta
#43I still prefer Iridium with its Quant search engine.
Re: Brave Search beta
#44Brave browser on android doesn't let me set it as default search yet. Maybe I need an update.
Re: Brave Search beta
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Even supposedly “neutral” or “private” search engines rely on big tech for results. Brave is different. We deliver results based on our own built-from-scratch index. We’re beholden to no one."
Why is this? I get that it's not easy to build a good search engine, but on the surface it doesn't seem to be that hard a technical problem to solve either. Is it simply that the R&D required to build something competitive is too high for most companies?
Do not forget that Brave (the browser) was designed/marketed as part of the US Culture Wars, basically as a Firefox-but-for-Conservatives.
Brave (the search engine) apparently follows the same strategy. The reason for having this index is basically political. Brave doesn't want to be impacted by Google or Bing's editorial choices. Of course, Brave Search will certainly be doing its own editorial choices.
Re: Brave Search beta
#46Previous 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 fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand. I would imagine Brave Search to have similar issues, at least in the beginning, but they did something smart to make it less painful:
> Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page.
So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result is on the same page, or just one click away.
Re: Brave Search beta
#47I’ve been using it. Seems like a solid search engine. Interestingly, Google appeared to be censoring results yesterday to hide reports about an unfortunate shooting at a Juneteenth event in Oakland and a subsequent situation where a crowd of people were blocking an ambulance from exiting the area of the shooting with wounded victims. Let’s just say the story didn’t play well to Google’s political base… so they hid it…
I'm wondering how this censoring process you envision actually played out at Google. Like did an executive tell an underling to hide this information from the world? I'm genuinely curious.
I’m also curious what Google’s “political base” is, since they’re apparently getting final say on the search results. I keep getting Pinterest on my image searches and maybe the political base can help.
Re: Brave Search beta
#48Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index, it will then get it from Google or Bing. I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.
I found the announcement blog post. Brave Search is a rebranding of Tailcat's product, which Brave acquired in March. https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/
@dang, this seems like a good candidate to replace the current link of this post.
Re: Brave Search beta
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Even supposedly “neutral” or “private” search engines rely on big tech for results. Brave is different. We deliver results based on our own built-from-scratch index. We’re beholden to no one."
Why is this? I get that it's not easy to build a good search engine, but on the surface it doesn't seem to be that hard a technical problem to solve either. Is it simply that the R&D required to build something competitive is too high for most companies?
I think it is definitely a hard problem to solve on a large scale to address latency, quality and size of the index they plan to address. It definitely isn't as easy as spinning up an elastic search cluster.
I agree that getting something "mostly" good or a domain specific search engine isn't as hard with the newest advances in this space with vector similarity indices.
Re: Brave Search beta
#50Reminder that Brave has done some morally questionable things in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers... They've since corrected both of those things, but those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization.
Didn't even realize the extent of the referral codes. Imagine if Chrome auto-inserted their own amazon affiliate links when people typed in Amazon.com - people would be up in arms.
Why would people be in arms? Seems like a perfectly fine thing to do. They are literally referring people with buy intent to amazon's deep product pages.