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Brave Search beta
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomcooks 5y agoVery curious on how this is going to work, especially advertisement-wise
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI'd be really shocked if it didn't tie to BAT in the Brave Browser, but I am definitely curious what they'll do for people who use it with other browsers.
- izzytcp 5y agoJust like their Ads -> BAT
- 55555 5y agoThey say it's their own index. That's amazing if true (I wouldn't put it past them to lie). It's super fast and the results (formatting, snippets, etc) look a lot like Google.
- jonathansampson 5y agoWhat reason would we have to lie? Thank you for the kind words and support otherwise Please do let us know if there is ever anything we can do for you.
- pineconewarrior 5y agoI imagine they will utilize the Basic Attention Token for search ads, in a similar fashion to the rest of their advertising. From the page: --- > Will I see Brave ads in Brave Search beta? What about Brave Rewards? > We’re currently thinking through different search experiences to offer our users. Some want a premium, ad-free search experience. Others want a free, ad-supported model. We think choice is best. Brave Ads with rewards is definitely possible, once we’re ready to take on the challenge of privacy-protected search ads. ---
- schmorptron 5y agoRight, their current browser ads seem to promise privacy by doing some floc-like thing on-device and preloading a bunch of ads to potentially show so the server doesn't know which ones were shown. Doing that for a website seems a bit different, but I don't see an issue with the DDG model of doing some very basic targeting based only on the current search term.
- calpaterson 5y agoThis seems to be quick and gives decent results for what I tried! Very promising! Going to try setting it as the default...
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI believe that in the address bar you should get an icon to set the current site as a search provider when you're on it. On Firefox it's in the more menu at the right end of the bar.
- calpaterson 5y agoIt looks to me that that is currently broken due to https://search.brave.com/auth/assets/opensearch.xml https://search.brave.com/auth/assets/opensearch.xml redirecting to https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/. I haven't managed it on Firefox yet
- w0ts0n 5y agoEdit: Try now, fix is out. we are working on pushing a fix out shortly. Stay tuned.
- calpaterson 5y agoSorted! Thanks!
- louffoster 5y agoI've been using it as default for few weeks. No complaints
- azinman2 5y agoI search to ask if brave built their own index. Relevant results up top, then I’m getting CNN article about Fox’s right word shift, and all kinds of other completely unrelated items. Incidentally they all were interesting sounding (clickbait) and I found myself reaching these unrelated articles. It was a bit like browsing Reddit, except this is a search engine and I had a very specific yes/no question.
- prepend 5y agoMore privacy-oriented search is a good thing, I think. I’d like more details on what they mean by private. I do like that they have a metric for what’s independent vs personalized and I think that will help reduce the “I did Google it and my top result conflicts with what you told me” type frustrations, https://search.brave.com/help/independence https://search.brave.com/help/independence
- Maksadbek 5y agoIt is yet another indexer or yandex :)
- mark_mcnally_je 5y agoHow have they gotten there search results?
- 55555 5y ago"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."
- kypro 5y agoWhy 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?
- Santosh83 5y agoI guess you can get 90% of the way, but the remaining 10% becomes really hard unless you're Google scale. But even several 90% alternatives would be better than absolute monopoly.
- Yoric 5y agoDo 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.
- jonathansampson 5y agoBrave is just a browser. It exists to empower the user, regardless of their personal politics. On "editorial choices," we've proposed Goggles, which you can read more about at https://brave.com/goggles https://brave.com/goggles.
- open-paren 5y agoApparently, 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.
- open-paren 5y agoI 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/ https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/
- frakkingcylons 5y ago@dang, this seems like a good candidate to replace the current link of this post.
- colesantiago 5y agoI still wouldn't use it since it falls back to Bing or Google.
- cj 5y agoPresumably the fallback happens server side, and presumably the google/bing queries are cloaked so your IP isn't making it to google/bing. Curious why you wouldn't use bing/google even if your queries are "proxied" through Brave servers? (Assuming Brave isn't also sending your IP, etc, when they submit the query to google/bing)
- vmullin 5y agoFallback can be turned off with an easy toggle in the settings: https://search.brave.com/settings https://search.brave.com/settings
- jonathansampson 5y ago
- jtdev 5y agoI’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. Brave search provided unfiltered/uncensored results.
- robbrown451 5y agoI'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.
- enumjorge 5y agoI’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.
- jtdev 5y agoDo you believe that Google doesn't engage in censoring search results? Do you know that YouTube was taking down the video of said incident yesterday and continues to do so today? https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/02/09/google-quietly-escalates-manual-search-censorship/ https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/02/09/google-quietly-esc...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- siproprio 5y agoWhy do they use > instead of /? It's Horrible. They also do not indicate when the result is a .pdf or a document. The best feature that google killed was advanced filtering. If instead of privacy brave gave me that, I'll sell my soul in a heartbeat!
- staticassertion 5y agoSeems quite fast, good UX overall. I like that it gives me information like "all results from Brave" so that if they do fall back I know about it. DDG has a 'bang syntax' where I can do things like '!rust' to start searching the rust docs from my url - I like that a lot, I wonder if there's anything similar here or if I could work around that somehow.
- schmorptron 5y agoThey already do, at least partially. Adding !g to the end of a search redirects to google.
- jonathansampson 5y agoUpdate: We do support !rust as well (and all of DDG's other bangs). Brave Search supports many shebangs, but I don't believe we've added support for `!rust` yet (we do have `!mdn` and `!so` though). I'll submit a request to add a `!rust` option too!
- rhizome 5y ago"Shebangs" have been defined as '#!' for decades, I'd suggest they not be redefined.
- smoldesu 5y agoShebang 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.
- morelisp 5y agoThe "she" is specifically a phonetic clipping of the "#", otherwise it's just a bang - but oh well, even jargon doesn't mean shit anymore.
- 5y ago
- nr2x 5y agoAt least they are trying to build an actual index instead of rebranding Bing like duck duck.
- Nicksil 5y agoBing is one of many sources from which duckduckgo derives its results; kind of like what's going on here with Brave's new search.
- lawl 5y agoNot true. In practice I've found their results to be basically identical to bing and other bing front-ends. What's not from bing are the widgets like weather, or dictionary definitions etc. So imo, "many sources, bing is just one" is misleading, as the main SERPs are pretty much straight up bing. (Note: I've used ddg as my main search engine for years)
- Nicksil 5y ago>Not true. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... >In practice I've found their results to be basically identical to bing and other bing front-ends. This is anecdote. Countering my argument -- calling it misleading -- with anecdote doesn't work.
- lawl 5y agoThey pretty clearly only talk about instant answers there. When they say over 400 sources it even links to [0] a page about instant answers. What do you expect? That I hack into ddg and give you their source? Try some searches for yourself and see that the results [1] are basically identical to bing [2] and other engines using bing[3], when compared to different indicies[4][5][6]. [0] https://duck.co/ia https://duck.co/ia [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monkey https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monkey [2] https://www.bing.com/search?q=monkey https://www.bing.com/search?q=monkey [3] https://www.qwant.com/?q=monkey https://www.qwant.com/?q=monkey [4] https://www.google.com/search?q=monkey https://www.google.com/search?q=monkey [5] https://search.brave.com/search?q=monkey https://search.brave.com/search?q=monkey [6] https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=monkey https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=monkey
- tnorthcutt 5y agoReminder that Brave has done some morally questionable things in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controversies 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.
- AegirLeet 5y agoIt's a browser with built-in cryptocurrency nonsense. That should tell you everything you need to know.
- smoldesu 5y agoYep. The fact that it even existed in the Brave browser at any point in time is enough to eternally dissuade me from using it.
- jonathansampson 5y agoThe BAT (and before it, Bitcoin) is there as an optional feature. It's not on or enabled by default. It's there for users who wish to anonymously earn rewards for their attention, and use those rewards to support content creators on the Web.
- smoldesu 5y ago...except those "rewards" don't ever reach the creators pockets, unless they're savvy enough to make their own ERC wallet and go through the collection process.
- celsoazevedo 5y ago"If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. [...] At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators." https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds
- michaelsbradley 5y agoLex Fridman interviewed Brendan Eich earlier this year (a real gem of an interview, in my opinion). I found all of it interesting, but here's a timecode link where they begin to discuss the current era of "browser wars", technical aspects and history of privacy protections, ads, search, and how that's all related. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE&t=7652s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE&t=7652s
- Santosh83 5y agoContrary to Brave Search's instructions to click the three dots (...) in Firefox's URL bar to add Brave Search, I don't get the dots at all. I do get Brave Search as a button when I click the URL bar and it drops down, but if I click on the Brave Search icon to add it, Firefox says: Invalid format Firefox could not install the search engine from: https://search.brave.com/auth/assets/opensearch.xml https://search.brave.com/auth/assets/opensearch.xml
- w0ts0n 5y agoEdit: Try now, fix is out. We are aware of the issue. We have a fix pending.
- isoskeles 5y agoIf they add bang operators, I might trial switching over from ddg.
- jonathansampson 5y agoWe have them today
- btdmaster 5y agoIt seems there is telemetry, sending the day, OS and browser type (among other things I cannot identify) by POST: https://archive.is/0NTrt https://archive.is/0NTrt It seems it can be disabled in the settings (https://search.brave.com/settings https://search.brave.com/settings) but it's opt-out rather than opt-in.
- vorticalbox 5y agoThis is rather annoying, hopefully it will be opt in once the beta is over.
- whydoyoucare 5y agoI still prefer Iridium with its Quant search engine.
- drannex 5y agoQwant really has been a lovely search engine, highly suggest it for anyone looking for something better than DDG.
- swader999 5y agoBrave browser on android doesn't let me set it as default search yet. Maybe I need an update.
- dalmo3 5y agoSame here. Latest version. Kinda ironic.
- jonathansampson 5y agoWe'll have this fixed soon; apologies for the inconvenience.
- TheFreim 5y agoI use Brave on android and I was able to set it. I think you have to do a search (or possibly go to settings on the site? I forget) and THEN follow the steps to add it. I thought there was an issue for a while but then I managed to get it set just fine.
- zzyzxd 5y agoPrevious related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 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.
- mrpf1ster 5y agoDuckDuckGo 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.
- zzyzxd 5y agoThe 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.
- the-pigeon 5y agoPersonally I find it pretty predictable which queries duck duck go will fail on. Basically very niche ones. So I just prepend based on what I'm searching for to begin with instead of after a failure. But I've also been using duckduckgo as my default for over a decade so I've gotten used to it.
- 5y ago
- joemccall86 5y agoNot sure if it's the hug of death, but this search generates a 500: https://search.brave.com/search?q=Spring+Boot https://search.brave.com/search?q=Spring+Boot
- counternotions 5y agoA likely monetization by Brave will be prioritizing search results for verified content creators within the BAT token ecosystem (a la Twitter check-mark).
- crackercrews 5y agoIs there a way to make this the default browser on iOS? I can see how to make it the default for searching in Brave but not system-wide. This matters for Siri-initiated searches.
- zanethomas 5y agocompare search results for "lab leak" https://search.brave.com/search?q=lab+leak https://search.brave.com/search?q=lab+leak https://www.google.com/search?q=lab+leak https://www.google.com/search?q=lab+leak https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lab+leak https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lab+leak https://www.bing.com/search?q=lab+leak https://www.bing.com/search?q=lab+leak
- bart__ 5y agoWhat am I supposed to see? All engines give the same or very similar results for me
- scoopertrooper 5y agoProbably some conspiracy nonsense.
- zanethomas 5y agoI'm not sure why you think it's relevant to make such a remark without a shred of evidence regarding my thoughts. I left it for the readers to form their own opinion. Something you apparently are loath to do.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoYes, I say what I mean. I don't hide behind the "I'm just asking questions" facade.
- adkadskhj 5y agoS/he literally didn't ask any questions though. Sounds like you have a lot of baggage and you're throwing it around here.
- zanethomas 5y agoAt least for me I saw that the search results for google were similar to brave while those for duckduckgo were similar to those from bing.
- schmorptron 5y agoThis is one to look out for, I've been using this for about a week, and the search results have been really good, empirically they feel a bit better than DuckDuckGo. If this stays this good over time and ends up having the same acceptable amount of text ads as DDG in order to be sustainable I might switch to it for good.
- imwillofficial 5y agoI’m stoked on this. Brave search may truly bring some new blood to the browser/search wars. This is what we desperately need as google gets less and less useful.
- didip 5y agooh, wow! Not bad at all considering they are building their own index. I like their results better than DDG. Between Brave and Vivaldi, I think moving out of the Google world for common folks is a possibility now.
- austinshea 5y agobrave is bad
- gr3pls 5y agogoogle is worse
- vlunkr 5y agoI really don't understand Brave. What special thing do they offer that people actually want? The main concrete selling point seems to built-in ad blockers, but we've had that for ages in every other browser. They have some crypto stuff going on, I'll be honest, I don't understand it, because I don't care, I just want to browse the web. That should be possible without a blockchain. They claim performance is better, but at the end of the day, it's chromium, I'm skeptical that they can do much to make a huge difference. Now they're offering yet another search tool. ok. If they didn't market themselves so aggressively in tech circles I think we would have all forgotten about this.
- smoldesu 5y agoPeople want a browser with an ad-blocker, and are too lazy to configure it themselves. Brave adds it and starts some "tell your friends" marketing hype. The rest writes itself.
- whimsicalism 5y ago> People want a browser with an ad-blocker, and are too lazy to configure it themselves. It's always shocked me, but this really is the case. I make a habit to install an adblocker (if they consent) whenever using a friend's computer, and have had many thank me for doing so a week later, saying what a huge difference it is - but none had thought it was worth the "effort" before. ?????
- smoldesu 5y agoThe world of postmodern software really is confusing.
- bmarquez 5y agoIt's not just laziness. My elderly parents aren't technically inclined, and are quite stubborn to learn. After they were phished by a malicious banner ad, I told them to install Brave since the idea of browser extensions would go over their heads.
- 5y ago
- smoldesu 5y agoWhy should I switch to this from DuckDuckGo? What is the value proposition here that's somehow greater than it's alternatives (DDG, Searx, etc.)?
- jonathansampson 5y agoDDG is a great search engine, and we are very thankful for the movements they've brought about in the private search space. That said, Brave is developing its own, distinct index. A recent example of what this means is from the "Tank Man" results on Bing recently. When Bing returned no results, DDG also returned no results. Brave Search, on the other hand, continued serving up results. As was stated elsewhere, "we aren't beholden to anybody."
- Dah00n 5y agoSo when Brave use Bing as a third-party and Bing censors a result like tank man, how do you make sure it doesn't change anything at Brave? How does Brave ensure that what is pulled in from a third-party is 100% censorship free? For example a search of "brave bat controversy" gives me the exact same top results on Brave search and Bing search. Are you saying this is not pulled from Bing?
- zanethomas 5y agoAlso interesting search for 'jan 6' and compare. It seems Brave and Google return similar results which differ from Bing and Duckduckgo, which resemble each other.
- timvisee 5y agoWhy does this footer hide after the first page view? > Brave Search uses private usage metrics to estimate overall activity and performance. You can turn off this option in Settings.
- jonathansampson 5y agoKeeping the UI clean. A section and toggle exists for the feature immediately within the https://search.brave.com/settings https://search.brave.com/settings page too.
- allyourhorses 5y agoBased on the principles in the blog post alone ( https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ ), this will obviously be my new default search until it's proven sufficiently unusable. DDG's usability has always been a bit of a problem for me, it feels more like a perl wrapper over some search bookmarks than an engine in its own right. Will give this one a go for a while, there is literally every reason to try and few reasons not to. edit: holy crap Brave, c'mon, 13 CSS files and 15 JS files for the search result page? Cold cache case absolutely matters when you're trying to grow, sort it out!
- onli 5y agoI used brave search over the last week or so. It worked well for me, with less failed searches than on DDG, which sadly often does not work for me for more local queries. It did not feel unusable at all. Note that I already liked cliqz before (properly evaluating how good a search engine is is hard, so that might have introduced bias).
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI going to try it, too, but I'm concerned that I only get 1 page of search results regardless of the search term. Weird.
- jonathansampson 5y agoPeople rarely venture beyond the first page of results. That being said, we've filed an issue to consider adding additional pages of results too. Thank you for the feedback!
- allyourhorses 5y ago> Fully private. No profiles. > Brave Search doesn't track you or your queries. Ever. It's impossible for us to share, sell, or lose your data, because we don't collect it in the first place So eh, Brave's search is actually running through Amazon CloudFront load balancers. This wasn't quite my first idea of privacy. At the very least, it means searches are likely being logged at least once, and stored using some policies set by Amazon, not Brave Some pretty curious internal API here: https://search.brave.com/api/state/independence https://search.brave.com/api/state/independence , found in the copious amounts of duplicate JS on the page
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pmurt7 5y agoVery impressed. Results seem already better than duckduckgo.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jppope 5y agoDefinitely worth giving it a try for a week or two. I already noticed that they put stackoverflow snippets right in the results which is fab
- staunch 5y agoIt's good for Google to have competition but they, or someone else, could just buy Brave and mangle or kill it. Turning web search into a protocol is what is needed. Maybe Brave could do this by sharing their index and creating a standard system for sharing indexes, spam blocklists, and whatever else is needed to operate an open web index that competes with Google.
- knz_ 5y agoBrave isn't competition to google. Brave browser is just chromium under the hood, and their search is clearly just piggybacking off of google and bing results like every other third rate search engine. The entire reason brave exists is so they can sell metrics data and push some garbage scamcoin.
- open-paren 5y agoI think they copied DuckDuckGo's bangs. It's nowhere in the documentation, and the UI never indicates it, but bang searches (like `!stackoverflow parse html with regex`) work in Brave Search exactly as they do in DuckDuckGo. Preliminary testing of mine suggests that they just copied DuckDuckGo's list directly–I tried a few obscure ones from DDG, like `!ldss` or `!uib`, and they work in Brave Search. @w0ts0n any details you are willing to share?
- jonathansampson 5y agoWe support many shebangs, with more to come in the future. For now, this is what is offered: !i - Search Images !n - Search News !a - Amazon !b - Bing !d - DuckDuckGo !e - eBay !g - Google !p - Pinterest !r - Reddit !s - StartPage !w - Wikipedia !li - LinkedIn !gh - GitHub !gm - Google Maps !so - Stack Overflow !tw - Twitter !yt - YouTube !wa - Wolfram Alpha !mj - Mojeek !osm - Open Street Map !mdn - Mozilla Developer Network
- open-paren 5y agoIf that's all that's offered, why does DDG's obscure shebangs work on Brave Search? https://search.brave.com/search?q=!hn+brave+search https://search.brave.com/search?q=!hn+brave+search
- jonathansampson 5y agoOh, apologies for the confusion. We support DDG's shebangs too; the above list is what we add to the list.
- open-paren 5y agoNo worries. Congrats on the launch.
- xpe 5y ago!g is called a bang. A shebang is something else ('#!').
- growt 5y agoIn really hope this improves. I firmly believe the web needs an independent index besides Google and MS. But the first two searches I made sadly returned subpar results. So I'll keep my fingers crossed.
- merlinscholz 5y agoLoving Brave search so far, but I am wondering if there is a way to manually add sites to the index? Adding them to the Google index and hoping for Brave to pick them up doesn't seem like a clean solution.
- Dah00n 5y agoBrave can't get the site from Google index (well they can but that would get them sued out of existence). You add to Bing to get a site on DDG and Brave search.
- phreeza 5y agoI don't quite remember, but wasn't the cliqz search engine ranking function somehow built on tracking users, kind of contrary to what brave stands for?
- andyxor 5y agointeresting paper by Brave search team: "GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web" https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf
- jonathansampson 5y agoShorter URL for anybody wanting to share: https://brave.com/goggles/ https://brave.com/goggles/
- codesternews 5y ago"Why not Shown HN" :P
- twiddlebits 5y agoThis is just bing reranked with occasional results thrown in perhaps from their own index. Just look at the query completion suggestions, they are identical to Bing. If they had their own index they'd have a link to the cached copy.
- adkadskhj 5y agoLooks cool! I sort of hate the UI though. Everything is so spaced out, on my screen i literally don't see the results. I see two top results, and 3 videos _(it's not a video search..)_, and that's it. Those top results i'm not sure if they're paid or not - so it makes me feel unsure if i'm seeing any real results or not. The page seems to waste space. I'd need a compact mode to use this search. The UI is difficult for me.
- butz 5y agoStrange, that there is a separate search tab for videos, but no "text only" search. Considering that 99% of video search results will be on youtube, I'd probably go straight to youtube if I needed to find a video.
- threatofrain 5y agoHow does Brave plan to handle relations with law enforcement and their requests? Will Brave offer a mechanism to uniquely identify the most offensive users?
- jonathansampson 5y agoNot sure what you're referring to here; Brave doesn't have any user data. We don't collect it to begin with. We believe in Can't be Evil over Don't be Evil.
- meibo 5y agoYet, you have no way to prove it - or is this product completely open source? Additionally, I believe OP was referring to requests for removal of search results that contain personal information. Both Google and Bing support these and will remove results in accordance with GDPR.
- threatofrain 5y agoI'm really just asking for those who search up "criminal" content, as I remember Google being asked to give up the IP addresses of those who searched under a term in a specific region at a specific time -- but that still meant thousands of addresses. But I think your case is also worth adding to the conversation, although I don't believe removing results collides with privacy.
- Dah00n 5y agoIf you return a result that came from Bing and law enforcement want it gone (because it is illegal for whatever reason) do Brave remove it from the results or do Bing? Both have problems but I'd like to know which route Brave take.
- maverick74 5y agoYeah yeah. Let me put it this way: if it's an opensource search engine you'll have me for sure. If it's not 100% opensource then I can't be sure you don't track me and we end up in the google cage again.
- float4 5y agoWhat is the roadmap for localisation? I tried some queries that should give localised results, but they yield terrible results (just like DDG does).
- azinman2 5y agoI find it very interesting that Eich was outsted from Mozilla for his anti-gay stance, and much of HN was in agreement at the time, yet this seems to never come up with Brave despite LGBTQ rights having far stronger support today. Why is that?
- throwaway292893 5y agoYes lets all grab pitchforks and chase him out of town because of his religious beliefs. So sick of leftists and your constant attacks in the name of diversity. Go find a hobby, you're not trying to further any cause or help anyone, you're just looking to cause drama and attack people. It was the majority opinion to oppose same-sex marriage. Are we going to cancel everyone who once or still supports it? Remember we are still very much a Christian country. Obama in 2008 ran against same-sex marriage and cited his Christian beliefs as the reason. We'd have to cancel many people's careers to pass your purity test of a clean history of accepted beliefs. In the woke world, similar to North Korea, if you commit a thought crime, you will be considered dirty blood, and it will be attributed to your family and friends as well.
- azinman2 5y agoFirst, I’m not looking to cause drama or attack anyone. I’m genuinely curious and to know what changed? It was a big deal then, but seems to never surface with anything Brave related since. And as they make bigger and bigger splashes, and this continues to not come up, I’m wondering why that is? You’re making a lot of assumptions about me, my motives, and belief structures. I’m just seeing a change in behavior on this issue in combination with larger societal sea changes, and wondering about the inconsistency. Meanwhile it sounds like you’re wanting to grab a pitchfork and chase me out of town for asking a question rooted in curiosity, which I understand to be the basis for HN conversation.
- throwaway292893 5y agoYou know exactly what you're doing. It wasn't a big deal then, and it shouldn't be a big deal now. It's cancel culture and you're participating in it. This is an amazing release and I'm glad Brave revived the technical marvel that was Cliqz, you can see that on display in their blog: https://www.0x65.dev/ https://www.0x65.dev/ But no, you decided to bring up bullshit drama. You're not generally curious, and even if you were, it's not really on topic. It's negative and non-constructive. You fool no one when you hide behind your "I was just asking a question" defense. You knew ahead of time what your question would provoke.
- gbmatt 5y agoI've been working on this private search engine https://private.sh/ https://private.sh/ for a while. It encrypts your query using client-side javascript so only the Gigablast search engine can read your query. And your query is delivered to Gigablast through an anonymizing proxy that is not in Gigablast's control. So you get TOR-like privacy. Also Gigablast's privacy policy https://gigablast.com/privacy.html https://gigablast.com/privacy.html shows that your query is not transmitted to 3rd parties or used for anything other than to return your results. Gigablast also has 0 dependencies on Bing or Google.
- bosswipe 5y agoMy dream for a search engine is to be able to exclude the entire ad+seo web from my results by filtering out any results that have 3rd part ad javascript. Then we could actually find the non-commercial web again and hopefully help it grow. This search engine is just trying to copy google's with a few tweaks in the result, not that interesting.
- ppeetteerr 5y agoI really like that they are pulling SO answers into their results: https://search.brave.com/search?q=strpos+php https://search.brave.com/search?q=strpos+php
- gigamatt 5y agoI've been working on this private search engine https://private.sh/ https://private.sh/ for a while. It encrypts your query using client-side javascript so only the Gigablast search engine can read your query. And your query is delivered to Gigablast through an anonymizing proxy that is not in Gigablast's control. So you get TOR-like privacy. Also Gigablast's privacy policy https://gigablast.com/privacy.html https://gigablast.com/privacy.html shows that your query is not transmitted to 3rd parties or used for anything other than to return your results. Gigablast also has 0 dependencies on Bing or Google.
- howolduis 5y agoare u planning to add image search? also where is the source code?
- gigamatt 5y agothe source code for gigablast is on github. yes, gigablast has image search but private.sh needs to start using it soon.
- manofthunder 5y agoEven if they add it we need to purchase it like gigablast. Use searx or swisscows instead.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aarnushrithkha 5y agoIm using private.sh but what is the proof that it does'nt have any logs and it isn't open source. And please add a anonymous view like startpage and make it open source.
- gigamatt 5y agoThe encryption code is open source as it is in the javascript so you can evaluate it. It's also available in the chrome plug-in, and there's now the app in the android play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privatesh.search https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privatesh.... so the private.sh web server or related anonymyzing proxy don't have access to your query since it is encrypted. on the gigablast servers will know your query, but they won't know your IP address.
- dylkil 5y agoit failed my first test of returning stackoverflow for a code error https://search.brave.com/search?q=null+pointer+exception https://search.brave.com/search?q=null+pointer+exception
- jaflo 5y agoNot sure if they updated it recently, but it pulls up all SO instant answer for me.
- meinfuhrer 5y agoMy first impressions using this are really good. I've been using DDG on mobile for many months (while sticking with Google on the desktop), but increasingly grew frustrated with the overall speed, and results on some queries...so I reluctantly switched back to Google on mobile this week. Unfortunately, looks like there's no way to set this as the default on Samsung Internet at the moment so I'm going to stick with Google for now.
- yewenjie 5y agoThere is a self-hosted Google search (which just strips some tracking but ultimately sends the query to Google nonetheless). - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search I would be curious if what HN thinks of it. I have experimented with it and it works fine from a user perspective.
- gr3pls 5y agoLooks good
- tisthetruth 5y agoDoes anyone use StartPage? Is it truly privacy friendly?
- cweagans 5y agoI really cannot understand why people go through the effort of building manual light/dark mode toggles in websites these days. I already set it system-wide. Just default to what I already specified. I see it all over the place and it boggles my mind when the user's preference is just a media query away.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI haven't implemented a client-side setting on my sites yet, but it's in the plans. I can tell you why I plan to do it, and also why I test with no-JS support and in text-mode browsers, implement status indicators and back-to-top buttons, and why I consider Netscape 2.0 a first-class citizen on my domains. Sure, the user-agent "should" provide all of that stuff, but the reality is that most don't have all the features I would want as a visitor to my site, so I have to bend over backwards to accommodate their specific abilities. The user-experience is a combination of three abilities: the ability of the user, the ability of the user-agent, and the ability of the Web site. Combined together they form the ACCESS-ABILITY landscape.
- cweagans 5y agoJust saw this. For things that the UA doesn’t provide, I see your point and agree. However, in this specific case, the user agent DOES provide the user preference for light vs dark mode. Why reimplement it?
- yepthatsreality 5y agoNot that they’re required to do so and more choice can be good, but why didn’t they work with DDG? I see they’ve gone ahead and stolen the bangs (!w) feature for themselves.
- throwaway292893 5y agoDDG just uses Bing results. This solution is completely independent. You may ask why that's needed, just recently DDG was censoring the "tank man" photo on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square because Bing was censoring it. This new indexer is very much welcome and I hope it stays free of censorship from the CCP, marxists, and others.
- yepthatsreality 5y agoYes that much is clear, but DDG has a privacy bent to their engine too. It just seems like working with DDG to remove that fault would be beneficial to both parties. If I recall, DDG chose to use Bing to remove Google from the equation but also prevent the need to reinvent the wheel. Brave for all their technological progress and talk about improving the web, often seem to promote only themselves with their advancements. They aren’t required to share anything however. The parroting of bangs is just a bit hostile is all.
- throwaway292893 5y agoBing and thus DDG's index really isn't that good. Is Microsoft an underdog now? Why do you consider them any better than Google, especially after the "tank man" fiasco? I don't see why it's a bad thing to make your own thing or to only promote your own company. Brave isn't reinventing the wheel either, they purchased & revived Tailcats from Cliqz (https://0x65.dev/ https://0x65.dev/) The bang operators are a small feature that are easy to implement, nothing special. Taking inspiration and features from competitors is nothing new. Even in this thread there was a user asking for them, saying they'd switch over if Brave implements them (they already have them obviously) I don't even think DDG came up with them first...
- 5y ago
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThere's only 1 page of search results, regardless of the search term. Why?
- fiala__ 5y agothis is to do with the philosophy of Cliqz (who developed what's now Brave Search) - if you can't find the results on the first page, you'll probably be better off changing the search term than paginating. I have no idea how reasonable that is though.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoSearch the word “porn”. 20 results? The results I want might be on the 2nd page or further. I’m willing to concede maybe I’m an outlier in behavior but I definitely want more than 20 results perhaps 33% of my searches. I wonder if cliqz did any studies on this before deciding on 20 fixed results. It also conveniently allows them to avoid the issue of paging search results.
- pythux 5y agoNot to be nitpicking, but we actually show up to 20 results (not counting infobox, videos, news, places, instance answer, etc.) in a single page, which would correspond to 2 pages of other search engines (they usually show up to 10 results per page). The idea is that most people will never go beyond first or (very rarely) second page. And as said in another comment, if you did not find what you were looking for in the top 20 results, changes are you will not find it in following results. We do have plans for a feature which would allow community-based alterations of our core ranking algorithm which might help here. You can read about it here: https://brave.com/goggles/ https://brave.com/goggles/ Disclaimer: I work on Brave Search.
- blackcat201 5y agoIf Brave is just another ad company (quote in their blog post) how is this different than Google?
- esjeon 5y agoAFAICT, Brave has been pushing "privacy-respecting ads", which likely are less profitable and less effective than targeted ads.
- jccalhoun 5y agoI wish them luck. More competition in search is welcome. I don't think I will use it very often though because accuracy in search results trumps any concern I have with privacy online that I get from using google or bing.
- staticmist 5y agoThe result accuracy actually seems pretty good thus far. Although I have mixed feelings about Brave as a company, I may have to switch over from DDG/SP.
- RileyJames 5y agoBut 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 discern accuracy in search results, as you can't see what's missing. But by the time you feel the results are missing something, they're likely missing ALOT.
- spiderice 5y ago> 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 YouTube are the only two things holding me back. And neither have any competition that is even remotely close imo.
- smoldesu 5y agoHave 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 https://searx.space
- mupuff1234 5y agoIs this actually more private then just opening your chrome/Firefox/etc in incognito mode and using Google?
- claytongulick 5y agoI think the thing that excites me the most about this, is the non-personalized search results. Ironically, I end up using DDG for more accuracy, because a lot of the time on Google I am unable to get to articles or information I'm looking for, no matter how I search. I think this is a result of personalized search results - i.e. Google "guessing" based on ML models what my interests are. Many times I don't want this, I just want to see pages that use the more classic PageRank algorithm. Honestly, sometimes when I search it feels like Google is "preaching" to me in a way - rather than showing me what I search for, it shows me what it thinks I ought to be viewing. I don't get this from DDG, it feels like the results there are a lot more objective?
- aembleton 5y agoI'm impressed. I've been using DDG for many years. Generally I don't need to revert back to Google; the last time I needed to was last year when looking for a particular GPX file for a walk I wanted to do called the Hebden 22. The search query was 'hebden 22 gpx'. There are many pages out there with broken links, and I probably went through the top 20 or so on DDG with no success. When I tried Google, the 4th result returned a page with the GPX once you've registered for a free account. That page appears at number one on Brave search!
- mderazon 5y agoDDG search is fine for me, the thing I think Google still does better is all the searches like "what's the weather in X", "3.5 miles to km", "what's the next NBA game" etc I found that Google still does these things much better.
- ernesth 5y agoGoogle has taught people to ask full questions (without question marks strangely), and knows how to treat those requests (Who is the mayor of Palo Alto; What's the weather in X"...). DDG is a little worse at that. I expect search engines to search for every words in my request, and I prefer shorter requests. DDG gives pertinent instant answers for "weather Paris", "3.5mi in km" and correct results for NBA schedule.
- howolduis 5y ago> 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-privacy" company. I will skip this one...
- jonathansampson 5y agoThat's not accurate. Brave offered affiliate link options to users who were searching for particular terms (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png). These were presented to users as a way of optionally supporting Brave development. Our mistake was matching fully-qualified URLs too (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image2-1.png https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image2-1.png). When we were made aware of this, we corrected the issue promptly. No revenue was made from this feature either. No user data was involved. No privacy or security was compromised. This was nothing more than traffic attribution as a means of optionally supporting an open-source, free-to-use browser. Read more about this feature at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. Compare this with traffic attribution in other browsers: open Firefox and begin typing a search query. If you monitor your network activity, you'll find that your keystrokes are not only sent to Google behind the scenes, but those requests also contain an identifier so that Firefox gets paid for sending you and your queries to Google. Brave users were shown the affiliate options before any network activity. Read more at https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/. As for the question of privacy, Brave was compared to Chrome, Firefox, and more in a review by Trinity College in Dublin, and they found that Brave exists uniquely in its own category as the "most private" browser tested. Read their technical paper here: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.
- kowlo 5y agoWhat about Safari?
- howolduis 5y agobrave used to redirect users when they visit crypto websites to their referral link so they earn money. Do u really trust a company that would do that?
- spiderice 5y agoMore than I trust Google, yes. Which is what the overwhelming majority of people are using.
- Dah00n 5y agoI 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.
- beprogrammed 5y agoOoh interesting. Ever since runaroo gave up the go, I've needed something new.
- ibraheemdev 5y agoWhat index is being used?
- pythux 5y agoWe use our own independent index.
- 6510 5y agocommunity-curated open ranking models https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf Wonderful stuff, best hill to die on.
- necessities 5y agoAbout a year ago I tried a few different web browsers (chrome, safari, firefox, and brave) to see which had the best user experience and which one I thought had the most value to add to me as a user. I settled on Brave because; 1. I don't have to install a adblocker or any third party extensions out of the gate. - Third party ones never seem to do the job on the other browsers. 2. Their form of rewarding creators is superior, in my opinion, to having creators appeal to a ad serving service for support. - I also find the rewards from viewing ads amusing and have even clicked on a few of the ads. 3. They seem to be the most engaged project with technology trends right now... I will also mention that their bookmark system works for me. The one feature I find to be missing is having the bookmark icons stay centered in the bar as they can in safari. It's not too hard for me to imagine that in ten years 90% of users will be using Brave and we will be here again talking about another new web browser on the scene shaking things up from the Brave status quo (instead of how we are with google).
- jonathansampson 5y agoThank you for the kind words and support! Please do let us know if there is ever anything we can do for you.
- smoldesu 5y agoIt would be very difficult for Brave to become the "browser status quo" without advertisers finding new ways to enforce dark patterns or otherwise abusive systems. Advertising is a bigger business than selling browsers.
- fx18011 5y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=gdp+of+brazil&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gdp+of+brazil&t=h_&ia=web https://search.brave.com/search?q=gdp+of+brazil https://search.brave.com/search?q=gdp+of+brazil One thing I am frustrated with DDG is its lack of summary card for some entries. I think Brave search better in this case.
- FireflyChild 5y agoI've been using it for a while with the beta, it's nice, but I wish they had a map page. Seems like something they could add in pretty easy, I guess.
- powerlogic31 5y agoI get dizzy from their design colors and contrast.
- dvcrn 5y agoIs there any way to make this the default in Safari?
- shp0ngle 5y agoWell. When I google myself, I find one page entirely of me, engineer from East Europe. When I Brave-search myself, I find my namesake from Ohio that died in 1919. But, I learned something new about Cleveland Ohio in early 20th century, so I guess it's not that bad.
- CRConrad 5y agoAnother way of looking at it: Hey, Brave really doing its bit for user privacy! ;-)
- dd444fgdfg 5y agoI'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
- pythux 5y agoWe are actually planning to implement just that! You can read more about our proposal here: https://brave.com/goggles/ https://brave.com/goggles/
- dd444fgdfg 5y agodamn, I can't believe how quickly you wrote that after my comment! :D
- dd444fgdfg 5y agothis Brave logo is so close to ING Direct Bank's (look at their ios app), it's ridiculous. Once they discover you I reckon they'll get legal action to change it.
- strin 5y agoMy two cents on paid search engines: yes so much awareness around privacy these days. so there might be a potential shift in user behavior, which opens up a big market. however, i am skeptical because people are used to free search engine that surfaces good results. so privacy is great value prop. but not so much that i am willing to pay for it while living with worse search quality.
- freediver 5y agoFew problems here: https://search.brave.com/search?q=who+is+the+mayor+of+palo+alto https://search.brave.com/search?q=who+is+the+mayor+of+palo+a... - Mayor is Tom DuBois. Name does not appear anywhere in results. - Seems that Brave should not be relying on Wikidata as the highlighted result is wrong - The wiki "box" on the side also looks a bit broken
- pythux 5y agoThanks! We'll have a look at this one. This is definitely broken.
- crowf 5y ago2 minor comments: 1 on mobile it is very convenient to have an x in the search box in order to clear that text from the previous search 2 when correcting spelling it would be nice if it bolded the word that was misspelled rather then the entire search phrase
- c-fe 5y agoWhen I search for “uva”, all the first results point to university of virginia, instead or university of amsterdam, even though the latter has more students, is older and higher ranked. The former does not even contain uva in their URL while the latter is uva.nl. From a neutral, international point of view, why should this Virginia school rank higher in searches than UVA? Situatiouns like these are what ultimately led me to switch from Duckduckgo back to google, and i test these things everytime I consider a new search. What is the use of privacy if the search results are not relevant to me?
- __ka 5y agoThe chosen country is important. `uva` may be more commonly associated with the University of Virginia in the US. For Netherlands (same query) https://search.brave.com/search?q=uva&country=nl https://search.brave.com/search?q=uva&country=nl will correctly point to Universiteit van Amsterdam. At present we default to country US. We're looking to implement better defaults soon. We do hope you stick around!
- c-fe 5y agoThanks, I appreciate you taking the time to address my problem, however me having to change the country manually sounds like an additional workaround. I wish you the best luck though with your search!
- the_other 5y agoThe whole point of DDG is to respect privacy. That means knowing as little about its users as possible. The country select actually improves the (impression of) privacy for me.
- Draken93 5y agoExciting news! Hopefully thats the first no tracking search engine that meets my requirements. It seems as Brave Search could be the first non-tracking search engine that combines satisfying search results with good presentation. I was never completly happy with DuckDuckGo, probably they use(despite others) search results of Bing. DuckDuck together with Startpage(google results but bad presentation) works for me but is unconvinient.
- gpmcadam 5y agoI'm really impressed by how finished this beta feels. Well done! The only thing stopping me from trying this out as my default search engine is my new-found reliance on the 'bang operators' on DuckDuckGo. Being able to type: !subreddit or !maps or whatever right in my address bar has become so convenient I feel I'm probably locked in for now. Maybe if something similar appears in future versions I might switch.
- pythux 5y agoHey, have you tried bangs on Brave Search? Lots of them should already work out of the box, if not, please let us know!
- gpmcadam 5y agoOh wow, I had tried `!reddit` and didn't get redirected so assumed none of them worked. Just tried `!subreddit` though and that one works. Will definitely give this a try as default engine now. Cheers.
- kaladin_1 5y agoOh wow! Goood news! I normally use Chrome and Google search for work and Firefox and DDG for personal things. Then, Brave for personal browsing that requires a vpn or Chromium support. Some websites are just optimised for Chrome, Brave always come in handy in that case.
- budibase 5y agoI've been using this for a day, and it's been surprisingly good. My only concern, is the grip of the Google ecosystem always seems to lure me back in. I feel, for this Brave to truly win, they need to consider Auth, workplace tooling, and email. Attempt to match Google toe-to-toe and fight them as a platform/ecosystem, rather than a search engine. Easier said that done, of course.
- qwertox 5y agoThis is Cliqz's Tailcat search engine. Hubert Burda Media sold it to Brave earlier this year and got some shares for it in return. I just hope that they really don't collect data or profile users, as there could exist the concern that it would get shared with Hubert Burda Media. Or if Hubert Burda Media sees this as a way to shape the search experience in favor of publishers, once it has gained a big enough user base. https://brave.com/brave-search/ https://brave.com/brave-search/
- mediocre-one 5y agoOff topic, a link description from my first search page renders a bit different. ``` Jan 12, 2021 - var ytplayer = ytplayer || ...tps:\/\/s.youtube.com\/api\/stats\/atr?docid=7EqnoEljHCw\&ei=aL-MX5nwOfjOzLUPxLWJiAw\&len=206\&ns=yt\&plid=AAWx-WOvfFqbWF59\&ver=2\",\"elapsedMediaTimeSeconds\":5}},\"videoDetails\":{\"videoId\":\"7EqnoEljHCw\",\"title\":\"** ... ```
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- junon 5y agoI'm ready for the downvotes, but Brave ruined its trust relationship with me ages ago. I don't think I'll be using this.