Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brave Search beta

search.brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 697 posts

Re: Brave Search beta

#511

Post by blackcat201 »

smoldesu wrote: post #389
spiderice wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Any idea why this reply is downvoted? It seems there's a lot of comments that has a slight negative or doubt are downvoted in this thread. You just don't see this behaviour on any other HN thread.

Re: Brave Search beta

#512

Post by ocdtrekkie »

losvedir wrote: post #466
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they're nearly indistinguishable from real organic search results, people click on them assuming the search engine found them the best result. This leads to two major problems: 1. Search ads are the primary source of malware and fraud on the Internet today. (Phishing emails are second.) Sites pretend to be other sites all the time, and to allow tracking and landing page behaviors, every major search ad provider…

> 2. Search ads use this placement as a form of extortion. If you run, say, Best Buy, you shouldn't have to buy search ads for "best buy", because obviously you're the best result. However, they have to, because if they don't, the search engine will sell ads to their competitors using their keyword, so people searching "best buy" get "Circuit City" as the top result instead. (Yes, I chose that reference in part becau…

Bear in mind, Best Buy should pay zero pennies for each of the millions of people trying to reach their website. It's absolutely inexcusable for a search company, which also owns an ad company, and also happens to run the web browser everyone's using, to create a system that basically taxes all attempts to visit a business's website specifically.

Honestly, what Google and Microsoft and such are doing in this case is trademark theft. They are selling the search result for a trademarked name they don't own, and when the actual trademark owner wants to be found by their own name... they have to pay for it.

I don't know who is going to file the case, but sooner or later, someone should, because it's a slam dunk.

Re: Brave Search beta

#513

Post by ocdtrekkie »

dheera wrote: post #465
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they're nearly indistinguishable from real organic search results, people click on them assuming the search engine found them the best result. This leads to two major problems: 1. Search ads are the primary source of malware and fraud on the Internet today. (Phishing emails are second.) Sites pretend to be other sites all the time, and to allow tracking and landing page behaviors, every major search ad provider…

> every major search ad provider allows ads to "lie" about the destination domain. This seems like the real problem, not search ads as a concept > So you may see an Amazon ad, it says it goes to Amazon.com, but actually directs through to realamazonlinkipromise.biz Just disallow that? Problem solved. If you want yet another filter, only allow public companies or companies that have raised >10M on Crunchbase to advert…

> Just disallow that?

Sure, Google could disclose real advertisement destination URLs tomorrow if they wanted. But the marketers are their customers, and that would upset their customers quite a bit. Especially since a lot of their customers' entire purpose in paying for Google Ads is to exploit that particular feature.

Re: Brave Search beta

#514

Post by ocdtrekkie »

SamBam wrote: post #486
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically what Google does to Wikipedia and rebrands as "Knowledge Graph".

Google has donated many millions to the Wikimedia Foundation, basically in payment for this. (But, again, there's a difference between scraping and echoing a request on another site and waiting for its response. The latter is basically unauthorized use of its API, not scraping.)

It'll be very telling if Google switches to using Wikipedia Enterprise: https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...

My guess is Google's "donation" is pennies on the dollar from what they benefit from Wikipedia, and more of a token gesture than anything else.

Re: Brave Search beta

#515

Post by ocdtrekkie »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #495
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may wish to review https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l... Google Search results are definitely "public data" so long as Google provides them to anyone who asks.

Then why does Startpage pay Google and DDG pay Microsoft?

While scraping search results isn't illegal, by any means, it's also not illegal for Google or Microsoft to block requests they believe are from competing search engines. Presumably the cost of paying them is less than the cost of hiring engineers to constantly try to find new ways to outwit Google and Microsoft engineers.

Again, if scraping data from websites without permission, Google simply wouldn't exist. Bear in mind, robots.txt is a feature that Google and Microsoft choose to respect, but the default assumption search engines have made from the beginning, is that they are free to grab whatever they want from the web, unless you ask them otherwise to please not.

Re: Brave Search beta

#516

Post by dd444fgdfg »

I'd really like to be able to customise (explicitly not based on my "behaviour"), how I want my search results ranked. I don't really care how you do it, let me upvote/downvote results, or let me build rules, but consider the default results just a starting point and then overlay the users preferred index

Re: Brave Search beta

#518

Post by mda »

bilkow wrote: post #358
corobo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do side by side comparisons. I haven't seen any of my searches (admittedly only the few I checked for this) differ from Bing's results in results or result positioning It's unfortunate really as the owner guy keeps saying they use multiple sources but in all of my tests.. they're all Bing. I don't care about using Bing, I do care about being deceived (slippery slope, thin end of the wedge, etc etc)

Interesting, in my tests (posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598329 ), the results differ a lot. Maybe its more about localization, I'm curious to see the same example from someone in the US, but there are two links which do not seem to be in Bing's results at all, making me believe it has been taken from somewhere else.

Do a few more tests, especially complex queries, you will see a pattern emerges. In my tests, It is definitely using the Bing index (not necessarily same ranking / filtering algorithms or the same version of the index)

Re: Brave Search beta

#519

Post by eyelidlessness »

jonathansampson wrote: post #415
smoldesu wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could start by listening instead of accosting every comment that you find. Your incessant reply-bombing is childish and unprofessional, nobody wants to engage with someone who defends a browser like it's their sole lifeline. Furthermore, you don't get to choose what your "UX issues" are. "UX" quite literally stands for "users experience", which is on the other side of the spectrum from "developer experience…

I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate, I'll post a response. Regarding user experience, I'm not just a developer of Brave, but I'm a user also ;-) Not only that, but I spend a lot of time speaking with users all across the Web, so as to unde…

> I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate, I'll post a response.

I’m not posting this in fight mode, I sincerely hope it will help: this is user hostile.

You’re responding but you’re not listening. You’re certainly not asking. How could you be sure you know what the other people you interact with think if you feel uniquely qualified to talk about users’ experience and just brush by people who don’t feel supported in their own experience?

Re: Brave Search beta

#520

Post by windowojji »

zzyzxd wrote: post #87
mrpf1ster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo allows you to do a Google search by prepending "!g" to any query. So usually I do that for the last 5% of queries that DDG fails on.

The frustration I am talking about is: Check query result -> realize the result is bad -> scroll back to the search bar -> place cursor at the beginning of the query -> enter "!g" -> redirect to Google.com It is not too bad on desktop, but doing it once on a smartphone is more than enough to push me to switch back to Google.

I'm amazed that DDG/Brave don't understand that typing something immediately after a "!" on a smartphone is annoying and difficult. DDG only supports "!" after the character for a small subset of bangs. Thankfully "g!" is one of them, but it's immensely easier to type on smartphone.
Post reply on HN