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In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different b

In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface. I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me). Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise from it.

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ricardo81 5y ago
I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.
- dantondwa 5y ago
  Really? That’s disappointing. Thanks for the heads up, I guess this explains why the results were good.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise? edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself
  - ricardo81 5y ago
    I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations. >edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google. If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.
    - gopi 5y ago
      Is it legal to scrape search results and use it in a competitive product?. Is this a legal grey area or its settled in court?
miav 5y ago
While Brave does turn many away with its built in cryptocurrency and its questionable userbase, it's a damn good browser. I switched from FF after the layoffs and in short it has better privacy, UX and feature set and all BAT functionality can be easily and completely disabled. It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow down Google's plans.
abawany 5y ago
I've been using Qwant as my main search engine for 2 years at least and ime/imo the results were fine. When a given query didn't give the results I expected, I searched for the same in Google and often came away similarly disappointed. I'm sad to see that Qwant is struggling.

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ricardo81 5y ago

I've had a look at their results (Brave beta), early days of course but it looks like the overwhelming majority of their results are just Google slightly re-ordered.

dantondwa 5y ago
Really? That’s disappointing. Thanks for the heads up, I guess this explains why the results were good.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise? edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself
- ricardo81 5y ago
  I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations. >edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google. If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.
  - gopi 5y ago
    Is it legal to scrape search results and use it in a competitive product?. Is this a legal grey area or its settled in court?

miav 5y ago

While Brave does turn many away with its built in cryptocurrency and its questionable userbase, it's a damn good browser. I switched from FF after the layoffs and in short it has better privacy, UX and feature set and all BAT functionality can be easily and completely disabled. It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow down Google's plans.

abawany 5y ago

I've been using Qwant as my main search engine for 2 years at least and ime/imo the results were fine. When a given query didn't give the results I expected, I searched for the same in Google and often came away similarly disappointed. I'm sad to see that Qwant is struggling.