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Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser

738 points by skellertor 5y ago

halfeatenpie 5y ago
How decent is Brave as a browser? I've been very hesitant on it as a primary browser due to them starting up their own cryptocurrency (BAT), adding automatic affiliate cryptocurrency links in pages, and a history of serving their own ads on top of others.
- des429 5y ago
  You can disable the cryptocurrency stuff and if you're worried about ads you could install whatever ad blocker youre currently using. Underneath everything it's just Chromium. I've been using it for a year or so.
- ricardolopes 5y ago
  As decent as any Chromium fork with built in ad/tracker blocker can be. The cryptocurrency is opt-in, the only affiliates I know of are in their start page widgets, and their ads don't sit on top of others, they're opt-in notifications.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Just use Ungoogled Chromium. I'm also the kind of person who's made uneasy by crypto involvement, and Brave's developers have lambasted me in the past for asking why such a ridiculous feature needs to exist in the first place. Oh, and 30% of your Basic Attention Tokens go straight to lining Brendan Eich's wallet. I'll just browse on my own, thank you...
  - BrendanEich 5y ago
    Here it seems you mean I personally get 30% of gross ad revenue (below you seemed to say I got 30% of all BAT; false also). No, the 30% goes to the company, commissions and costs come out of it, and I get nothing directly tied to it. I get a lower-six-figure salary. Smearing me on false information is a bad look. Doing it again would be lying. Knock it off.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Great, the browser that was supposed to take a stand against Google only managed to cave in to their exact monetization scheme. Somehow I'm not surprised by the fact that you have nothing better to do than respond to Hacker News comments.
      - BrendanEich 5y ago
        No, Brave's opt-in and private/anonymous ad system is not "their exact monetization scheme". Saying it is the same just parades your ignorance or dishonesty. Which is it?
- soundnote 5y ago
  It's essentially stock Chromium with a bunch of tinfoil on top. This means good Chromium UI things like tab groups, which are a digital form of meth. They have a built-in adblocker (not an extension, a modification of the browser itself so it doesn't care about Manifest v3. It can also do CNAME uncloaking, which is what makes uBO better on Firefox than Chromium), a lot of anti-tracking features. Importantly, they maintain their own end to end encrypted sync architecture like Mozilla does. They have miscellaneous sideshow features like a torrent client and a Tor implementation (but AFAIK recommend the Tor Browser still) A big thing is that the adblocker is that it's there on mobile. They're also the only mobile Chromium browser that can play YouTube videos in the background as far as I know. As far as the crypto goes, it's actually a decent system: Brave sells adspace (which they deliver as new tab backgrounds and toaster popups, entirely separately from websites), gets paid in Money™. They keep a cut, take the rest and buy BAT with it, give it to users. They have a tipping system where users can then tip content creators with the BAT and get creators some compensation for Brave's part in killing tracking ads. (this can never be a full compensation, since Brave's ads don't track, and should thus be less valuable than evil ads) --- If you want bigtime UI innovation, I'd look elsewhere - Brave's angle is stock Chromium, privacy, and standalone infrastructure to provide independent revenue. The big UI innovators in Chromium land are Microsoft (if you don't care about privacy, Edge is sadly a disaster on that front) and Vivaldi (who are also very no tracky and run their own end to end encrypted sync service. Both have a lot of fantastic UI customization features. Microsoft's more well-designed ones that are both pleb friendly and powerful, Vivaldi's more of the "here's all the toggles" type. To illustrate their type of overkill, they have THREE separate tab group implementations built in. And a mail client, calendar, RSS reader, a barebones notes module - did I mention these guys used to make Opera?
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  We launched tipping with Bitcoin, but had to pivot when network fees and congestion were unbearable (our users would buy $5 at a time, pay nearly as much in fees, and wait for what seemed like an eternity to receive their funds). BAT (ERC-20) offered immediate relief. Brave has never added affiliate links into pages. Brave has never served its own ads on top of others'.
brenelson 5y ago
Still, Google owns everything in terms of search engines. You can't probably deny that, but it's a big prop to Brave for creating their unique search engine.
penjelly 5y ago
ive been using brave search since release. i switched from DDG which was working for me. brave works for most of my purposes but when it doesn't the option to "anonymously gather google results" makes me feel like I'm never missing out
Proven 5y ago
> Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported. Well, there's that. I assume they won't implement ad blocking for that one.
- leodriesch 5y ago
  Hadn’t thought about the native ad blocking feature^^ it is indeed a bit contradictory.
  - pythux 5y ago
    Brave browser does not block first-party ads by default so it should not be contradictory. If a user decides to enable aggressive mode of Shield then fist-party ads are blocked as well.
    - Proven 5y ago
      Aggressive mode? What's that setting called? Because I don't see it in Brave on iPad. I hope it's not "block JS" because that would make the browser unusable. I tried BSE with ad blocking on and had to scroll down past the ads to see the first result. Plus it's not possible tell for sure when ads begin and end.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
This is mostly common sense, but it'll be really interesting to see the metrics: People choosing to use the Brave browser should presumably trust Brave as their search as well, especially once the crypto ad scheme ties into their search engine too. This might be a case where most people follow along with the switch.
TheEnder8 5y ago
This seems more like trying to capture money. If this was about privacy, they could have just gone with duckduckgo.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Despite all their posturing about privacy, DDG is the same as Google. Especially given their founder's history with selling user data.
- sholladay 5y ago
  Have you spent much time with Brave Search? I use Firefox and currently have DDD as the default search on my laptop, but I often use the !g operator since the DDD results are routinely not as good as Google. I’ve had a significantly better experience with Brave Search, though. I’ll probably switch my default soon, once I learn the operators that Brave supports.
  - trts 5y ago
    The bang operators for ddg justify it as my default even knowing that it isn’t very good for some queries. The habit of being able to reroute a search to the engine that will handle it most appropriately is a killer feature. Only drawback is that the redirect can take an extra few seconds sometimes. It’s hard to imagine replacing it. If Brave search becomes excellent then I can just use the bang for it.
    - Comkid 5y ago
      Brave Search already has bangs, they imported them from DDG. I believe they’ve changed some of them though
- eloisius 5y ago
  For all the love DDG gets on this site, it’s not really an independent search engine. It relies heavily on the Bing index, despite spinning it as using it as one of many signals. Brave has its own index and that puts it in another class. In my experience the results have been higher quality, too.
smoldesu 5y ago
Great, now I can accumulate my $.05 worth of monthly BAT a little faster! Edit: I expected the YC crowd to pick up on Palantir puppets a bit faster. I'll gladly burn karma to get the word out though.
- soundnote 5y ago
  The point of BAT is not to get money for yourself, but to be able to tip creators. Individual ad viewers aren't terribly valuable (and Brave ads not being evil makes them less valuable), and only matter as a mass. You'll get a bit of pocket money, but as they aggregate on creators' end, that can compensate for losing revenue from evil ads getting blocked.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    The purpose of BAT is funding Brave development, which is why Brendan Eich personally claims 30% of the currency ever minted. It's a joke along the same lines as Tether or Bingus Token in the world of DeFi.
    - BrendanEich 5y ago
      A stupid pair of assertions, given etherscan.io exists and shows all flows from creation of BAT on. I don’t have and have never had 30%, nor has Brave ever sold BAT to pay for development or anything else.
devwastaken 5y ago
This reminds me to uninstall brave. Rebranded chromium with crypto shilling and now "premium search"? They didn't even test DNS with their tor feature, causing identity leaks. Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled and include the codecs and DRM libs? Woolyss builds do all that, but there's no fancy single download installer+auto updater. We need just "chromium".
- zeronine 5y ago
  brave shilling is concerningly effective
  - fastball 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm honestly flabbergasted that people like using a browser that has the performance of Chromium without the Google, a thorough / very performant ad-blocker built-in, and some totally optional next-gen features that many people like.
    - tommit 5y ago
      I'm with you. I check out most brave threads on HN and am always surprised by the level of hatred towards it. I've been using it for over a year now. It's a good browser and I like the new ideas they come up with. I don't know whether it's going to catch on, but at least someone is thinking outside the box.
      - Tepix 5y ago
        I'm surprised by the hatred towards pretty much anything these days, even things that are benign.
    - AegirLeet 5y ago
      There is no "Chromium without the Google". Chromium/Blink is made by Google. By using a browser built on Chromium/Blink, you are actively supporting Google's browser engine hegemony.
eloisius 5y ago
I’ve been using Brave search for several months now. I switched the day that it was announced. The quality is fairly good, but I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little as it indexes more widely or something. At first I was impressed with how little spam ended up in top results, but lately exact queries for Python functions or prominent API functions have lots of spammy content above the actual documentation. Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc. I’m still rooting for them, but in general I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results on Google, DDG and now Brave. I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).
- spurgu 5y ago
  > I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little I've had the exact same experience and sharing the same doubts as well. For programming related queries I'm going to Google 100% though, it understands the intent so much better. But for general queries I use Brave 90%+ of the time. But, it feels like I'm adding !g to the query more often than I used to in the beginning.
- thejosh 5y ago
  The spam google has for this is outrageous.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I completely agree. I almost guarantee if they hired a couple hundred people to look for spam and isolate that out and feed it back into ML models they could eliminate 80% of it. It's SO obvious.
- sph 5y ago
  DDG is awful for spam on most searches which can't be easily resolved with a Wikipedia info box. The 3rd result onward is very fishy, content spammy results of very low quality. It's like their algo isn't good enough to separate the wheat from the chaff yet.
whoisjuan 5y ago
Honest question. I have used DuckDuckGo and Brave Search and although they seem to do the job for generic searches they really suck for very specific searches. How likely is for one of these search engines to catch-up technologically to Google's sophistication? I really can't see a clear trajectory for them to compete with Google's quality.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  They will never catch up because Google is the only one dedicating enough engineering to match the growing amount of information, and their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Brave is already comparable in quality to Google IMO, to the point where I maybe go to Google once every couple of weeks, if that. Superior, if you're searching for anything at all "controversial" that Google bans or demotes. And where it knows it's lacking, it gives you the option to mix in Google results if you'd like. I'm very impressed with Brave Search. I'm also disappointed and annoyed that Apple completely controls iOS search engine selection and doesn't allow adding custom search engines at all. Safari is the best mobile browser hands down, except for this "inconvenience". iOS Brave is worse than Safari, at least for me.
  - silisili 5y ago
    There is a growing sentiment, mine included, that Google search isn't getting better. In fact, I feel it's markedly worse for many queries. The problem for me are all the blogspams out there. These -should- be easy to just punt, but alas, they do not. I'd gladly switch to any search that didn't show me such results.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      I share the sentiment. Unfortunately it means other engines struggle even more, because they are all using roughly the same basket of techniques. I’m familiar with the claims that DDG and Brave serve equally good or better results. An insightful breakthrough in quality that vastly reduces the computing and engineering required to serve great results that keep up with expanding information, similar to what Google did for search 20 years ago, would be wonderful, but it won’t come from DDG or Brave unless they can develop new models that completely replace their current search products.
1_player 5y ago
Great! I've recently mentioned that Brave Search is the only alternative search I've stuck to since day 1. Works much better for me than DDG or any other search has ever did. Not perfect, rarely returns DE results instead of English, but from my point of view they're doing something good and I'm sold. But please, give me a way to pay for it. I don't want to be the product, one day.
- curvilinear_m 5y ago
  > But please, give me a way to pay for it. I don't want to be the product, one day. From what I understand, this is already planned. > Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported. Brave Search will also offer an ad-free Premium version in the near future.
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  I switched to Brave Search after I saw DDG had some unfavorable hiring practices. I'm also ready to pay. After seeing Google censor search terms it doesn't like and promote results that ideologically align a certain way, I'm willing to pay for search rather than be subtly influenced by the richest, most educated people on the planet to act the way they want me to.
deleted 5y ago
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zestyping 5y ago
Does anyone else find the font choice in Brave Search to be an obstacle for them? I just find it so hard to read. I've set Brave as the default search in my browser (Chrome) in an attempt to give less of my traffic to Google, but most of the time I just get frustrated trying to read the search results and repeat the query in Google Search. I know it's ridiculous that I haven't just switched back to Google. I still want Brave to win, but trying to stay on the Brave page is an actively unpleasant experience. The closest analogy I can think of is that it feels like trying to make myself eat vegetables I hate (which is a poor analogy because I like vegetables!)
- leodriesch 5y ago
  +1. I think they use Poppins, which IMO is one of the most overused Google fonts and also more of a display font. I don’t know why they couldn’t use something more optimized for reading small characters like Inter or just use the system font stack.
- perihelions 5y ago
  If you're using uBlock, you can one-click block remote font loading from a domain in the badge popup menu (or write custom rules using the no-remote-fonts: or *$font syntax). This will force a fallback to system fonts, which should be perfectly fine. This hardly the "best" solution, but, everyone has uBlock installed, and it's literally a 5-second hack. With pictures: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-remote-fonts https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
  - Kiro 5y ago
    > everyone has uBlock installed I don't know anyone using uBlock. I know a few using AdBlock but that's it.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  You can write an user script to replace fonts if you use something like Greasemonkey.
smartpants 5y ago
https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/
- U8dcN7vx 5y ago
  Refused. I presume because I don't generally browse with ECMAscript enabled. Back to DDG Lite.
tootahe45 5y ago
I keep getting NFT and crypto advert-type popups which put me off using brave.
- merlinscholz 5y ago
  There is a simple checkbox to turn those off. IIRC they even are opt in.
- przeor 5y ago
  they have turn off switch for this?
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    Check out brave://rewards/
- gilrain 5y ago
  You shouldn’t have chosen to receive those if you don’t like them? They’re opt in when you install. Feel free to turn them back off…
charcircuit 5y ago
It doesn't seem as good. My first search: what's the latest minecraft version Brave: 1.14.4 Google: 1.17 Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years. Second search: 白の意味 Brave: On Japan location 6 garbage search results + irrelevant wikipedia page. On United states 3 garbage search results before a relevant result. The first result is literally a private YouTube video. Seriously? Google: Has a snippet about the meaning of white and the first result is a dictionary entry. The indexing for Google seems to be equally as private, so brave search just seems like a downgrade.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account. On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is continuously degrading.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    >Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account. If anyone should be paying me it should be Brave for pointing out their weak spots.
  - gandalfgreybeer 5y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me being worse at using keywords to search for what I need but I’ve noticed that it’s so much harder to find things that are actually helpful via google on stackoverflow etc. Most annoying thing is when I restrict keywords and they still show up on the search results. Now when I can’t find something on Google, instead of refining keywords, I give DDG or Bing a go first (both not always successful but half the time I find more useful links).
    - gremIin 5y ago
      It's not you. Google nerfed search a few years ago. I noticed exactly what you noticed around 2016 or so.
      - 5y ago
nabaraz 5y ago
I use DDG on desktop but on mobile they are unusable. Their app displays three ads out of 4 results in a page. A simple typo gives me completely different results. I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  > I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all. This would be ideal as Google Search has the best results for me. But I don't see it ever happening. Although I'm sure many people would pay, it'd be a drop in the ocean compared to all people that wouldn't (and hard to justify dedicating resources to it when you're already making tons of money with the ad-supported free version).
- decrypt 5y ago
  About the tracking part, you may like to check Whoogle Search - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search It's Google results without the tracking, and it can be self-hosted.
  - nabaraz 5y ago
    This looks great. I wish Nextdns provided this.
    - decrypt 5y ago
      I have used NextDNS in the past (pihole now) but I wonder what Whoogle does different from DNS filters.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Google used to be good at one point in time. Now its search results aren't very relevant, it returns what it thinks it should interest you, not what you've actually searched for. It doesn't matter if you do a verbatim search, it will still try to be smart and use alternative terms.
- decrypt 5y ago
  I haven't used Google for many years, so I can't speak to whether it shows personalized results today. But, I recently switched to Whoogle Search (https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search) which shows Google results but without the tracking. I am happy with it, that I have completely ditched DuckDuckGo in favor of it.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    There is also startpage.com, which gives you Google search results but with privacy. But my problem is finding relevant information.
    - vincent_s 5y ago
      Startpage is now owned by an advertising company [1] [1] https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/ https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...
      - freediver 5y ago
        Hmm "advertising company" as in "a company that is in the business of selling ads"? So same like Google, DuckDuckGo and Brave?
- 1_player 5y ago
  I hate how smart it tries to be. Sometimes you need to search an intentional misspelling, say, "Aple" (just an example), Google will helpfully try to correct you with "did you mean Apple?", and even if you put the word in quotes you still get results for Apple, not my intentionally misspelled search. Listen to what I'm trying to tell you, dumb machine. They've tweaked it so it only respond to what it thinks you want to search, not what you've asked of it, and there's no way around it. Computers are so much better when they take your input literally.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
Joe Rogan mentioned on his show past week that he stopped using google search as well. Joe is convinced google is censoring results on covid, because he kept getting back official sources (benefits of the vaccine), when he was searching the opposite. Keyword searches for specific articles failed to return results. He now questions what else google is censoring.
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Joe is a magical thinker.
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that. What do you mean by that.
- aqualinux 5y ago
  Big tech bots are going to downvote you for saying this
- galgot 5y ago
  Agree with Joe, I believe in Bigfoot, and each time I search for live Bigfoot vids I only get unconvincing crappy stuff... They hide something...
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    Agree with Joe too. It's like when you order a steak, and ask for a knife, and the waiter brings you back a spoon for you own safety. I would get pretty annoyed.
gowthamgts12 5y ago
are people still using brave after they have been caught multiple times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
travisgriggs 5y ago
Can anyone compare/contrast DuckDuckGo with Brave Search? I use the Brave browser and am a fan, but like many others, I search primarily with DDG, using the occasional g! <search> to see if something developer related shows up better there (I'd say 20%-10% of the time I find additional resources/answers on Google). Does BS have bang codes like DDG?
- m0zg 5y ago
  Yes, it has the bangs, and it's about on par with Google on most searches. There's no downside to trying it. Try it yourself.
- pmurt7 5y ago
  duckduckgo is Bing with a new skin and privacy features. Brave Search is built on top of an independent index.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
I don't use Brave and know nothing about Brave Search, but any move away from breaking Google's virtual monopoly on search can't be bad.
Krasnol 5y ago
How is this "news" so high up? This isn't even technically interesting.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0x49d1 5y ago
Unfortunately can't use it: I'm on my private VPN almost all the time (need it for work). VPN is hosted as OpenVPN service on German Digital Ocean server to have static public IP. The VPN is mine only (sure IP is not), I'm the only person who uses it. Brave Search shows error on accessing: https://ibb.co/72L3mc5 https://ibb.co/72L3mc5 . Other search engines open without problems. Turning off VPN helps, but I don't really understand why my (Digital Ocean's) ip is related to opening the web search page? Even if someone "compromised" that IP - it should not be a stopper to open the search from my point of logical view.
- knuthsat 5y ago
  I usually can barely browse the internet using VPN through OVS, Digital Ocean, Scaleway and others. All websites assume my traffic is not from a person but from an automated server.
- vadfa 5y ago
  It seems normal to me that they only want access from residential IP blocks.
  - 0x49d1 5y ago
    Ok, but others are not restricting such behavior, so this one is a restriction for me. They can decide whether traffic is an organic search at least checking if I rush their page with the rate of 100 requests per second or smth similar. For me this is a downside that I'm restricted in usage of "public" resource.
    - schleck8 5y ago
      Google answers with a captcha occasionally, the 'suspiscious traffic from your network' one
- Matheus28 5y ago
  A LOT of abuse come from datacenter IP ranges. Most sites find it easier to just blacklist them all.
ecmascript 5y ago
Braver search works if you are searching in english but for my native tounge DDG delivers much more reliable results.
deadalus 5y ago
Brave is superior if you're searching for anything "controversial" that Google bans, censors or demotes.
- spiderfarmer 5y ago
  That's only really useful for anthropologists though.
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  Like what?
treelovinhippie 5y ago
Wish they'd fix the bugs in basic currency conversion searches.
skinkestek 5y ago
I'm actually tempted to start using Brave. I'm still holding out with Firefox despite Mozilla trying very hard to get rid of us (to the point where the thought has struck me more than once if the current CEO of Mozilla is in the pocket of Google). If at some point the last competing mainstream browser engine is gone I'll probably go for Brave and I might start testing it this week.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Brave is just Chromium with a cryptocurrency scam bolted on to it. I'm unhappy with Firefox's ad-related changes recently, but Brave is definitely not an option. If it came to it, I'd use a WebKit browser — objectively worse, but not clearly compromised.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Brave is Chromium with more web features and more privacy and crypto stuff that is turned off by default. It has Web Torrents, IPFS, Tor, built-in ad blocking, etc. I just don't understand how someone can be "mad" at a feature that is turned off by default, especially when most browsers ship with literal spyware turned on.
    - skyfaller 5y ago
      For the record, IPFS also has ties to cryptocurrency with Filecoin. I have no intention of using Brave or IPFS for that reason, if I can avoid it. I really think most people don't understand how destructive cryptocurrency is, in multiple ways. If you don't care about the energy use causing greenhouse gas emissions, how about electronic waste? https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/ How about the impact on any service that offers free CPU cycles, such as continuous integration systems used by open source projects? https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas... How about the impact on critical infrastructure such as hospitals due to ransomware? https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/ransomware.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/ransomware.html Cryptocurrency isn't just a disaster, it's several disasters bundled together. Anyone working with it in any way, anyone who has a stake in cryptocurrency, has been compromised, and can no longer be trusted, just as your neighbor who is trying to sell you on their multilevel marketing scheme can no longer be trusted. (Did they invite you to dinner? Oh, surprise, it's just to sell you on their MLM again.) They are ignoring multiple dire ethical problems as they sell their relationship with you for funny money.
watrami 5y ago
I've been using Brave for a few years now in combination with ublock origin - as Brave just does not block everything that's annoying. I use duckduckgo and don't see a need to switch to Brave search. I primarily like the Brave sync feature, and it's actually the second main reason I recommend using Brave these days. It was quite junky when it was first released but by now it works like a charm for my 6 devices.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Same boat, but after using brave search, it really is better (IME).
neiman 5y ago
Between Google and Brave I prefer using Brave, but am I the only one bothered that this move is an abuse of power of a company that has both a browser and a search engine? We all know where this leads to.
- lopis 5y ago
  On new android devices in Europe, google was forced to let users select their preferred search engine from a randomized list of the 5-6 most popular options in that country. This could definitely come to browsers at some point. But then it's probably a death sentence to Firefox who needs to set Google as its search provider to survive.
sdfjkl 5y ago
Nice to see the search results look the same with and without Javascript enabled. Sadly not the image search. Surely this must be possible. We don't need inline previews.
thrdbndndn 5y ago
How good is it for non-English content?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
agilob 5y ago
No one talking about how fast a browser company can move if not dependent on money from Google?
jeroenhd 5y ago
You know what, I welcome a new search provider, even if it's by a cryptocurrency company. I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo. What I don't see is where Brave gets its image search results from. After Microsoft blatantly started serving the CCP by blocking queries for "tank man", which as far as I know they've never actually apologised for, just explained it as "a filter with more impact than expected" or some BS like that, I found out that most "competing" search engines bought all of their image search from Microsoft, leading to the same kind of censorship on platforms such as duckduckgo. Brave says it's using "third parties" to generate the results but I can't easily see which third party that would be. If they are using Bing like all the others, I wouldn't trust their image search engine in the slightest. Personally, I'll just assume they are for now, because they don't seem to clarify this further anywhere else. From what I can tell, there are four image/video search providers in the world: Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu. The rest all seem to license their results from one of the big four, mostly from Bing. When I need to pick from those four, I'll stick with Google; their censorship is relatively mild. I was hoping Brave Search would prove to be an alternative in this area, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  I'd honestly rather have a search provider run by the CPC than by a cryptocurrency company, though naturally I'd prefer neither.
  - wubin 5y ago
    > I'd honestly rather have a search provider run by the CPC Any reason behind your preference? It baffles me to hear you'd rather use a heavily censored and CCP-controlled search provider than a search provider from a free market with an alternative business model.
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      As @skyfaller posted elsewhere in this discussion: > Cryptocurrency isn't just a disaster, it's several disasters bundled together. Anyone working with it in any way, anyone who has a stake in cryptocurrency, has been compromised, and can no longer be trusted, just as your neighbor who is trying to sell you on their multilevel marketing scheme can no longer be trusted. (Did they invite you to dinner? Oh, surprise, it's just to sell you on their MLM again.) They are ignoring multiple dire ethical problems as they sell their relationship with you for funny money. Basically, any involvement with cryptocurrency is a strong signal of untrustworthiness and lack of scruples. Mere political censorship isn't in the same league.
Kiro 5y ago
I usually use something like "My Public IPv4 is" to see what IP address is in the index to derive what provider a search engine is using. However, Brave Search apparently does not even allow hard quotes and gives me random stuff related to IPv4. People keep saying that Google doesn't respect what you enter but for this query Google is the only one respecting it. DDG starts out with a few results matching it exactly but then goes off the rails with random results.
spiderfarmer 5y ago
What I hate about Brave Search is that their bot disguises as a regular user and they don't publish the IP addresses of their bot. You can't target it through robots.txt and you'll never know if you've blocked one of their IP's by mistake. Brave calls this a privacy feature. My ass.
paulcarroty 5y ago
Well, that's brave move! :) Already tried it several times and can share some experience: * searching 'npm flag xyz' - working fine * searching 'npm error some text' - just bad, a lot of non-relevant stuff. Anyway, it's naive to expect a real Google competitor right now.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Programming and code-related queries are definitely challenging. That being said, when we can improve (and there are definitely many opportunities to do so) we'd appreciate if you clicked the 'Feedback' link at the top of the results, and let us know what was off about the entries returned. Also, consider checking out Fallback Mixing (https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback) and the Web Discovery Project (https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project) for more on how we are working to improve Brave Search more efficiently.
afurculita 5y ago
I've been using Brave Browser for almost a year already. I fallback to Chrome when I can't get through some Recaptchas: this is the only annoying thing on Brave, you get a lot of Recaptchas that are invisible on Chrome and some are impossible to solve. I've also switched to Brave Search immediately when it come out. I'm satisfied with the search results I get for 90% of my queries, switching back to Google for the remaining 10%. My main problems with Brave Search are: 1. It doesn't have good localised results for non-english queries; here Google remains the best; 2. It doesn't have support for verbatim searching
dzhiurgis 5y ago
I've tried their search, it was ok, but my brain would get so stressed when not finding right info and would blame brave instead... Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google (and other engines)? The other problem with Brave is that crypto token integration in everywhere which feels more dystopian than Google's data gathering. And let's be honest - memory use after few days is same as Chrome's.
- pmurt7 5y ago
  "Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google (and other engines)?" Yes, simply add !g to your search query.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    That is like n steps: 1. Click on address field 2. Move cursor to start of field (cmd + left) 3. Shift + 1 to print bang, g Was hoping I could cycle thru bing/google/ddg/back to brave to quickly compare results. something like using wasd keys, no modifier.
nikkinana 5y ago
Great news. But nobody cares. And I'm shadow banned so fuck you.
cortexio 5y ago
a basic test shows that brave search, just like google search, prefers mainstream propaganda over true facts. I cant tell to which extend because it seems like brave search only allows me to see 2 pages of results. There's no next page button or on scroll update. duckduckgo seems to handle this better. But there are even better ones which im not going to mention because i dont want anyone to change them.
buggythebug 5y ago
That's rather brave of them
bob229 5y ago
Only a mad man uses any google product
pmurt7 5y ago
By the way, DuckDuckGo is no better than Google. DuckDuckGo said no. But when I reapplied as a black lesbian who can’t speak English, they wanted me: https://lulz.com/community/thread/social-experiment-duckduckgo-hiring-racial-discrimination/ https://lulz.com/community/thread/social-experiment-duckduck...
- mlk 5y ago
  just apply as a FtM trans
midrus 5y ago
I'm an extremely happy Brave user since last year, and my default search service is duckduckgo. Not missing neither chrome nor google search.
leoxv 5y ago
Just tried it out. Looks nice (except for that unremovable crypto button on the toolbar), but I need SpeechSynthesis (TTS) support. Will stay with FF and use MS Edge for its excellent TTS. The search engine is pretty weak judging from my initial queries.
- gilrain 5y ago
  The crypto button is removable. Have a look through your settings.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    Specifically, brave://settings/?search=hide+brave+rewards+button
yonaguska 5y ago
For non-technical searches, mostly stuff relating to news, politics, or Covid, Google is next to useless at this point due to their attempts to combat misinformation. Even their autocomplete functionality guides potential search queries in an entirely unorganic manner. For instance, something may be trending according to google, while simultaneously being blacklisted as an autocomplete option- if it has Any elements of wrongthink about it.
- ajvs 5y ago
  Joe Rogan also commented on this cover-up a few days ago: > "Look, if I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to Duck Duck Go. I wasn’t finding them on Google,” Rogan urged. [1] https://summit.news/2021/10/19/video-joe-rogan-accuses-google-of-hiding-information-on-vaccine-deaths/ https://summit.news/2021/10/19/video-joe-rogan-accuses-googl...
  - mehphp 5y ago
    It's sad that Joe Rogan comes up as any kind of authority on anything besides mixed martial arts.
    - symlinkk 5y ago
      Why do you need to be an “authority” to talk about what you saw with your own eyes on a search engine?
      - mehphp 5y ago
        You don't think it's dangerous for someone with a platform like Rogan has to spread misinformation? That's what I'm referring to.
        infinitezest 5y ago
        Which of his claims are you asserting is misinformation?
new_realist 5y ago
Can I download Brave’s index and host it myself for truly private search?
atum47 5y ago
The last update broke the maximize button. But it's a good browser never the less.
rvz 5y ago
At least Brave has the courage to rid of Google as the default search engine, unlike Firefox.
orangepurple 5y ago
Friendly reminder that ungoogled chromium exists https://chromium.woolyss.com/ https://chromium.woolyss.com/
wly_cdgr 5y ago
This is work by the Cliqz team they bought out, primarily. Just to give credit where it's due
surajs 5y ago
Chromium based browser with attitude annoy me
howolduis 5y ago
are you still redirecting your users to referral links without their consent to make money in cryptocurrencies?
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Brave never redirected users to referral links. We did have a bit of mistaken behavior in the browser's suggestion list. We offered affiliate codes as a way to support Brave development. If a user typed in a matching search term (e.g. Binance), our suggestion list would offer the affiliate link for the Binance site. This feature was intended for search input, but mistakenly matched fully-qualified URLs too (e.g. binance.us). We shipped a fix quickly, and turned the feature off by default. You can read more about that here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
howolduis 5y ago
would be nice if you would display the number of results, this is a very helpful feature to me at least. I use it often to check if a phrase is grammatically correct or if one term is more popular than the other etc.
howolduis 5y ago
It's not clear whether users are opted-out the data collection by default or if this is something that we need to do manually. Looking at the settings, it looks like everyone is opted-in the data collection, and you have to manually opt-out, which is a nightmare for people like me who delete all browsing history, cookies, and data upon browser exit. I will stick with DuckDuckGo.
- justfortechnews 5y ago
  There's more info about this on the FAQ page: https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project
sharken 5y ago
Brave browser is my go-to Android browser and i hope this initiative works out for the best. One problem i regularly have is that the browser becomes unresponsive, e.g. won't update the screen. The only remedy is to close and open the browser. On second thought i should probably go see if this issue is widespread.
sadfev 5y ago
Brave is the last bastion of good open source commercial software. I will try to support them as long as they aren’t bankrupt.
ozten 5y ago
"brave aquires search company" - 4th SERP is accurate [1]. Not to shabby! 100% of results from Brave index. Congrats to Cliqz team. It is a shame that Brave / Cliqz couldn't work with DuckDuckGo to help them get onto an independent index, assuming they would want that, instead of competing. I think there was already a lot of overlap in customer mindshare. [1] https://search.brave.com/search?q=brave+aquires+search+company&source=web https://search.brave.com/search?q=brave+aquires+search+compa...
- freediver 5y ago
  You have a typo in your query (acquires) but strangely even with the correction first three results are irrelevant.
  - ozten 5y ago
    Aproximately 100% of my searches include atlest one typo. Spellcheck is for the week.
princevegeta89 5y ago
Everyone making their own search engines these days. Notable mentions are the shady mobile browsers lol. None of these can even scratch what Google as a search engine is.

738 points by skellertor 5y ago

How decent is Brave as a browser? I've been very hesitant on it as a primary browser due to them starting up their own cryptocurrency (BAT), adding automatic affiliate cryptocurrency links in pages, and a history of serving their own ads on top of others.

des429 5y ago
You can disable the cryptocurrency stuff and if you're worried about ads you could install whatever ad blocker youre currently using. Underneath everything it's just Chromium. I've been using it for a year or so.
ricardolopes 5y ago
As decent as any Chromium fork with built in ad/tracker blocker can be. The cryptocurrency is opt-in, the only affiliates I know of are in their start page widgets, and their ads don't sit on top of others, they're opt-in notifications.
smoldesu 5y ago
Just use Ungoogled Chromium. I'm also the kind of person who's made uneasy by crypto involvement, and Brave's developers have lambasted me in the past for asking why such a ridiculous feature needs to exist in the first place. Oh, and 30% of your Basic Attention Tokens go straight to lining Brendan Eich's wallet. I'll just browse on my own, thank you...
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  Here it seems you mean I personally get 30% of gross ad revenue (below you seemed to say I got 30% of all BAT; false also). No, the 30% goes to the company, commissions and costs come out of it, and I get nothing directly tied to it. I get a lower-six-figure salary. Smearing me on false information is a bad look. Doing it again would be lying. Knock it off.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Great, the browser that was supposed to take a stand against Google only managed to cave in to their exact monetization scheme. Somehow I'm not surprised by the fact that you have nothing better to do than respond to Hacker News comments.
    - BrendanEich 5y ago
      No, Brave's opt-in and private/anonymous ad system is not "their exact monetization scheme". Saying it is the same just parades your ignorance or dishonesty. Which is it?
soundnote 5y ago
It's essentially stock Chromium with a bunch of tinfoil on top. This means good Chromium UI things like tab groups, which are a digital form of meth. They have a built-in adblocker (not an extension, a modification of the browser itself so it doesn't care about Manifest v3. It can also do CNAME uncloaking, which is what makes uBO better on Firefox than Chromium), a lot of anti-tracking features. Importantly, they maintain their own end to end encrypted sync architecture like Mozilla does. They have miscellaneous sideshow features like a torrent client and a Tor implementation (but AFAIK recommend the Tor Browser still) A big thing is that the adblocker is that it's there on mobile. They're also the only mobile Chromium browser that can play YouTube videos in the background as far as I know. As far as the crypto goes, it's actually a decent system: Brave sells adspace (which they deliver as new tab backgrounds and toaster popups, entirely separately from websites), gets paid in Money™. They keep a cut, take the rest and buy BAT with it, give it to users. They have a tipping system where users can then tip content creators with the BAT and get creators some compensation for Brave's part in killing tracking ads. (this can never be a full compensation, since Brave's ads don't track, and should thus be less valuable than evil ads) --- If you want bigtime UI innovation, I'd look elsewhere - Brave's angle is stock Chromium, privacy, and standalone infrastructure to provide independent revenue. The big UI innovators in Chromium land are Microsoft (if you don't care about privacy, Edge is sadly a disaster on that front) and Vivaldi (who are also very no tracky and run their own end to end encrypted sync service. Both have a lot of fantastic UI customization features. Microsoft's more well-designed ones that are both pleb friendly and powerful, Vivaldi's more of the "here's all the toggles" type. To illustrate their type of overkill, they have THREE separate tab group implementations built in. And a mail client, calendar, RSS reader, a barebones notes module - did I mention these guys used to make Opera?
jonathansampson 5y ago
We launched tipping with Bitcoin, but had to pivot when network fees and congestion were unbearable (our users would buy $5 at a time, pay nearly as much in fees, and wait for what seemed like an eternity to receive their funds). BAT (ERC-20) offered immediate relief. Brave has never added affiliate links into pages. Brave has never served its own ads on top of others'.

brenelson 5y ago

Still, Google owns everything in terms of search engines. You can't probably deny that, but it's a big prop to Brave for creating their unique search engine.

penjelly 5y ago

ive been using brave search since release. i switched from DDG which was working for me. brave works for most of my purposes but when it doesn't the option to "anonymously gather google results" makes me feel like I'm never missing out

Proven 5y ago

> Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported. Well, there's that. I assume they won't implement ad blocking for that one.

leodriesch 5y ago
Hadn’t thought about the native ad blocking feature^^ it is indeed a bit contradictory.
- pythux 5y ago
  Brave browser does not block first-party ads by default so it should not be contradictory. If a user decides to enable aggressive mode of Shield then fist-party ads are blocked as well.
  - Proven 5y ago
    Aggressive mode? What's that setting called? Because I don't see it in Brave on iPad. I hope it's not "block JS" because that would make the browser unusable. I tried BSE with ad blocking on and had to scroll down past the ads to see the first result. Plus it's not possible tell for sure when ads begin and end.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

This is mostly common sense, but it'll be really interesting to see the metrics: People choosing to use the Brave browser should presumably trust Brave as their search as well, especially once the crypto ad scheme ties into their search engine too. This might be a case where most people follow along with the switch.

TheEnder8 5y ago

This seems more like trying to capture money. If this was about privacy, they could have just gone with duckduckgo.

JohnWhigham 5y ago
Despite all their posturing about privacy, DDG is the same as Google. Especially given their founder's history with selling user data.
sholladay 5y ago
Have you spent much time with Brave Search? I use Firefox and currently have DDD as the default search on my laptop, but I often use the !g operator since the DDD results are routinely not as good as Google. I’ve had a significantly better experience with Brave Search, though. I’ll probably switch my default soon, once I learn the operators that Brave supports.
- trts 5y ago
  The bang operators for ddg justify it as my default even knowing that it isn’t very good for some queries. The habit of being able to reroute a search to the engine that will handle it most appropriately is a killer feature. Only drawback is that the redirect can take an extra few seconds sometimes. It’s hard to imagine replacing it. If Brave search becomes excellent then I can just use the bang for it.
  - Comkid 5y ago
    Brave Search already has bangs, they imported them from DDG. I believe they’ve changed some of them though
eloisius 5y ago
For all the love DDG gets on this site, it’s not really an independent search engine. It relies heavily on the Bing index, despite spinning it as using it as one of many signals. Brave has its own index and that puts it in another class. In my experience the results have been higher quality, too.

smoldesu 5y ago

Great, now I can accumulate my $.05 worth of monthly BAT a little faster! Edit: I expected the YC crowd to pick up on Palantir puppets a bit faster. I'll gladly burn karma to get the word out though.

soundnote 5y ago
The point of BAT is not to get money for yourself, but to be able to tip creators. Individual ad viewers aren't terribly valuable (and Brave ads not being evil makes them less valuable), and only matter as a mass. You'll get a bit of pocket money, but as they aggregate on creators' end, that can compensate for losing revenue from evil ads getting blocked.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  The purpose of BAT is funding Brave development, which is why Brendan Eich personally claims 30% of the currency ever minted. It's a joke along the same lines as Tether or Bingus Token in the world of DeFi.
  - BrendanEich 5y ago
    A stupid pair of assertions, given etherscan.io exists and shows all flows from creation of BAT on. I don’t have and have never had 30%, nor has Brave ever sold BAT to pay for development or anything else.

devwastaken 5y ago

This reminds me to uninstall brave. Rebranded chromium with crypto shilling and now "premium search"? They didn't even test DNS with their tor feature, causing identity leaks. Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled and include the codecs and DRM libs? Woolyss builds do all that, but there's no fancy single download installer+auto updater. We need just "chromium".

zeronine 5y ago
brave shilling is concerningly effective
- fastball 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm honestly flabbergasted that people like using a browser that has the performance of Chromium without the Google, a thorough / very performant ad-blocker built-in, and some totally optional next-gen features that many people like.
  - tommit 5y ago
    I'm with you. I check out most brave threads on HN and am always surprised by the level of hatred towards it. I've been using it for over a year now. It's a good browser and I like the new ideas they come up with. I don't know whether it's going to catch on, but at least someone is thinking outside the box.
    - Tepix 5y ago
      I'm surprised by the hatred towards pretty much anything these days, even things that are benign.
  - AegirLeet 5y ago
    There is no "Chromium without the Google". Chromium/Blink is made by Google. By using a browser built on Chromium/Blink, you are actively supporting Google's browser engine hegemony.

eloisius 5y ago

I’ve been using Brave search for several months now. I switched the day that it was announced. The quality is fairly good, but I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little as it indexes more widely or something. At first I was impressed with how little spam ended up in top results, but lately exact queries for Python functions or prominent API functions have lots of spammy content above the actual documentation. Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc. I’m still rooting for them, but in general I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results on Google, DDG and now Brave. I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).

spurgu 5y ago
> I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little I've had the exact same experience and sharing the same doubts as well. For programming related queries I'm going to Google 100% though, it understands the intent so much better. But for general queries I use Brave 90%+ of the time. But, it feels like I'm adding !g to the query more often than I used to in the beginning.
thejosh 5y ago
The spam google has for this is outrageous.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I completely agree. I almost guarantee if they hired a couple hundred people to look for spam and isolate that out and feed it back into ML models they could eliminate 80% of it. It's SO obvious.
sph 5y ago
DDG is awful for spam on most searches which can't be easily resolved with a Wikipedia info box. The 3rd result onward is very fishy, content spammy results of very low quality. It's like their algo isn't good enough to separate the wheat from the chaff yet.

whoisjuan 5y ago

Honest question. I have used DuckDuckGo and Brave Search and although they seem to do the job for generic searches they really suck for very specific searches. How likely is for one of these search engines to catch-up technologically to Google's sophistication? I really can't see a clear trajectory for them to compete with Google's quality.

1123581321 5y ago
They will never catch up because Google is the only one dedicating enough engineering to match the growing amount of information, and their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results.
- m0zg 5y ago
  Brave is already comparable in quality to Google IMO, to the point where I maybe go to Google once every couple of weeks, if that. Superior, if you're searching for anything at all "controversial" that Google bans or demotes. And where it knows it's lacking, it gives you the option to mix in Google results if you'd like. I'm very impressed with Brave Search. I'm also disappointed and annoyed that Apple completely controls iOS search engine selection and doesn't allow adding custom search engines at all. Safari is the best mobile browser hands down, except for this "inconvenience". iOS Brave is worse than Safari, at least for me.
- silisili 5y ago
  There is a growing sentiment, mine included, that Google search isn't getting better. In fact, I feel it's markedly worse for many queries. The problem for me are all the blogspams out there. These -should- be easy to just punt, but alas, they do not. I'd gladly switch to any search that didn't show me such results.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    I share the sentiment. Unfortunately it means other engines struggle even more, because they are all using roughly the same basket of techniques. I’m familiar with the claims that DDG and Brave serve equally good or better results. An insightful breakthrough in quality that vastly reduces the computing and engineering required to serve great results that keep up with expanding information, similar to what Google did for search 20 years ago, would be wonderful, but it won’t come from DDG or Brave unless they can develop new models that completely replace their current search products.

1_player 5y ago

Great! I've recently mentioned that Brave Search is the only alternative search I've stuck to since day 1. Works much better for me than DDG or any other search has ever did. Not perfect, rarely returns DE results instead of English, but from my point of view they're doing something good and I'm sold. But please, give me a way to pay for it. I don't want to be the product, one day.

curvilinear_m 5y ago
> But please, give me a way to pay for it. I don't want to be the product, one day. From what I understand, this is already planned. > Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported. Brave Search will also offer an ad-free Premium version in the near future.
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I switched to Brave Search after I saw DDG had some unfavorable hiring practices. I'm also ready to pay. After seeing Google censor search terms it doesn't like and promote results that ideologically align a certain way, I'm willing to pay for search rather than be subtly influenced by the richest, most educated people on the planet to act the way they want me to.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zestyping 5y ago

Does anyone else find the font choice in Brave Search to be an obstacle for them? I just find it so hard to read. I've set Brave as the default search in my browser (Chrome) in an attempt to give less of my traffic to Google, but most of the time I just get frustrated trying to read the search results and repeat the query in Google Search. I know it's ridiculous that I haven't just switched back to Google. I still want Brave to win, but trying to stay on the Brave page is an actively unpleasant experience. The closest analogy I can think of is that it feels like trying to make myself eat vegetables I hate (which is a poor analogy because I like vegetables!)

leodriesch 5y ago
+1. I think they use Poppins, which IMO is one of the most overused Google fonts and also more of a display font. I don’t know why they couldn’t use something more optimized for reading small characters like Inter or just use the system font stack.
perihelions 5y ago
If you're using uBlock, you can one-click block remote font loading from a domain in the badge popup menu (or write custom rules using the no-remote-fonts: or *$font syntax). This will force a fallback to system fonts, which should be perfectly fine. This hardly the "best" solution, but, everyone has uBlock installed, and it's literally a 5-second hack. With pictures: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-remote-fonts https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
- Kiro 5y ago
  > everyone has uBlock installed I don't know anyone using uBlock. I know a few using AdBlock but that's it.
DeathArrow 5y ago
You can write an user script to replace fonts if you use something like Greasemonkey.

smartpants 5y ago

https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/

U8dcN7vx 5y ago
Refused. I presume because I don't generally browse with ECMAscript enabled. Back to DDG Lite.

tootahe45 5y ago

I keep getting NFT and crypto advert-type popups which put me off using brave.

merlinscholz 5y ago
There is a simple checkbox to turn those off. IIRC they even are opt in.
przeor 5y ago
they have turn off switch for this?
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Check out brave://rewards/
gilrain 5y ago
You shouldn’t have chosen to receive those if you don’t like them? They’re opt in when you install. Feel free to turn them back off…

charcircuit 5y ago

It doesn't seem as good. My first search: what's the latest minecraft version Brave: 1.14.4 Google: 1.17 Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years. Second search: 白の意味 Brave: On Japan location 6 garbage search results + irrelevant wikipedia page. On United states 3 garbage search results before a relevant result. The first result is literally a private YouTube video. Seriously? Google: Has a snippet about the meaning of white and the first result is a dictionary entry. The indexing for Google seems to be equally as private, so brave search just seems like a downgrade.

moralestapia 5y ago
Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account. On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is continuously degrading.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  >Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account. If anyone should be paying me it should be Brave for pointing out their weak spots.
- gandalfgreybeer 5y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me being worse at using keywords to search for what I need but I’ve noticed that it’s so much harder to find things that are actually helpful via google on stackoverflow etc. Most annoying thing is when I restrict keywords and they still show up on the search results. Now when I can’t find something on Google, instead of refining keywords, I give DDG or Bing a go first (both not always successful but half the time I find more useful links).
  - gremIin 5y ago
    It's not you. Google nerfed search a few years ago. I noticed exactly what you noticed around 2016 or so.
    - 5y ago

nabaraz 5y ago

I use DDG on desktop but on mobile they are unusable. Their app displays three ads out of 4 results in a page. A simple typo gives me completely different results. I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all.

gtirloni 5y ago
> I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all. This would be ideal as Google Search has the best results for me. But I don't see it ever happening. Although I'm sure many people would pay, it'd be a drop in the ocean compared to all people that wouldn't (and hard to justify dedicating resources to it when you're already making tons of money with the ad-supported free version).
decrypt 5y ago
About the tracking part, you may like to check Whoogle Search - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search It's Google results without the tracking, and it can be self-hosted.
- nabaraz 5y ago
  This looks great. I wish Nextdns provided this.
  - decrypt 5y ago
    I have used NextDNS in the past (pihole now) but I wonder what Whoogle does different from DNS filters.

DeathArrow 5y ago

Google used to be good at one point in time. Now its search results aren't very relevant, it returns what it thinks it should interest you, not what you've actually searched for. It doesn't matter if you do a verbatim search, it will still try to be smart and use alternative terms.

decrypt 5y ago
I haven't used Google for many years, so I can't speak to whether it shows personalized results today. But, I recently switched to Whoogle Search (https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search) which shows Google results but without the tracking. I am happy with it, that I have completely ditched DuckDuckGo in favor of it.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  There is also startpage.com, which gives you Google search results but with privacy. But my problem is finding relevant information.
  - vincent_s 5y ago
    Startpage is now owned by an advertising company [1] [1] https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/ https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...
    - freediver 5y ago
      Hmm "advertising company" as in "a company that is in the business of selling ads"? So same like Google, DuckDuckGo and Brave?
1_player 5y ago
I hate how smart it tries to be. Sometimes you need to search an intentional misspelling, say, "Aple" (just an example), Google will helpfully try to correct you with "did you mean Apple?", and even if you put the word in quotes you still get results for Apple, not my intentionally misspelled search. Listen to what I'm trying to tell you, dumb machine. They've tweaked it so it only respond to what it thinks you want to search, not what you've asked of it, and there's no way around it. Computers are so much better when they take your input literally.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

Joe Rogan mentioned on his show past week that he stopped using google search as well. Joe is convinced google is censoring results on covid, because he kept getting back official sources (benefits of the vaccine), when he was searching the opposite. Keyword searches for specific articles failed to return results. He now questions what else google is censoring.

sydthrowaway 5y ago
Joe is a magical thinker.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  I'm not sure about that. What do you mean by that.
aqualinux 5y ago
Big tech bots are going to downvote you for saying this
galgot 5y ago
Agree with Joe, I believe in Bigfoot, and each time I search for live Bigfoot vids I only get unconvincing crappy stuff... They hide something...
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Agree with Joe too. It's like when you order a steak, and ask for a knife, and the waiter brings you back a spoon for you own safety. I would get pretty annoyed.

gowthamgts12 5y ago

are people still using brave after they have been caught multiple times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

travisgriggs 5y ago

Can anyone compare/contrast DuckDuckGo with Brave Search? I use the Brave browser and am a fan, but like many others, I search primarily with DDG, using the occasional g! <search> to see if something developer related shows up better there (I'd say 20%-10% of the time I find additional resources/answers on Google). Does BS have bang codes like DDG?

m0zg 5y ago
Yes, it has the bangs, and it's about on par with Google on most searches. There's no downside to trying it. Try it yourself.
pmurt7 5y ago
duckduckgo is Bing with a new skin and privacy features. Brave Search is built on top of an independent index.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

I don't use Brave and know nothing about Brave Search, but any move away from breaking Google's virtual monopoly on search can't be bad.

Krasnol 5y ago

How is this "news" so high up? This isn't even technically interesting.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

0x49d1 5y ago

Unfortunately can't use it: I'm on my private VPN almost all the time (need it for work). VPN is hosted as OpenVPN service on German Digital Ocean server to have static public IP. The VPN is mine only (sure IP is not), I'm the only person who uses it. Brave Search shows error on accessing: https://ibb.co/72L3mc5 https://ibb.co/72L3mc5 . Other search engines open without problems. Turning off VPN helps, but I don't really understand why my (Digital Ocean's) ip is related to opening the web search page? Even if someone "compromised" that IP - it should not be a stopper to open the search from my point of logical view.

knuthsat 5y ago
I usually can barely browse the internet using VPN through OVS, Digital Ocean, Scaleway and others. All websites assume my traffic is not from a person but from an automated server.
vadfa 5y ago
It seems normal to me that they only want access from residential IP blocks.
- 0x49d1 5y ago
  Ok, but others are not restricting such behavior, so this one is a restriction for me. They can decide whether traffic is an organic search at least checking if I rush their page with the rate of 100 requests per second or smth similar. For me this is a downside that I'm restricted in usage of "public" resource.
  - schleck8 5y ago
    Google answers with a captcha occasionally, the 'suspiscious traffic from your network' one
Matheus28 5y ago
A LOT of abuse come from datacenter IP ranges. Most sites find it easier to just blacklist them all.

ecmascript 5y ago

Braver search works if you are searching in english but for my native tounge DDG delivers much more reliable results.

deadalus 5y ago

Brave is superior if you're searching for anything "controversial" that Google bans, censors or demotes.

spiderfarmer 5y ago
That's only really useful for anthropologists though.
KoftaBob 5y ago
Like what?

treelovinhippie 5y ago

Wish they'd fix the bugs in basic currency conversion searches.

skinkestek 5y ago

I'm actually tempted to start using Brave. I'm still holding out with Firefox despite Mozilla trying very hard to get rid of us (to the point where the thought has struck me more than once if the current CEO of Mozilla is in the pocket of Google). If at some point the last competing mainstream browser engine is gone I'll probably go for Brave and I might start testing it this week.

NoGravitas 5y ago
Brave is just Chromium with a cryptocurrency scam bolted on to it. I'm unhappy with Firefox's ad-related changes recently, but Brave is definitely not an option. If it came to it, I'd use a WebKit browser — objectively worse, but not clearly compromised.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Brave is Chromium with more web features and more privacy and crypto stuff that is turned off by default. It has Web Torrents, IPFS, Tor, built-in ad blocking, etc. I just don't understand how someone can be "mad" at a feature that is turned off by default, especially when most browsers ship with literal spyware turned on.
  - skyfaller 5y ago
    For the record, IPFS also has ties to cryptocurrency with Filecoin. I have no intention of using Brave or IPFS for that reason, if I can avoid it. I really think most people don't understand how destructive cryptocurrency is, in multiple ways. If you don't care about the energy use causing greenhouse gas emissions, how about electronic waste? https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/ How about the impact on any service that offers free CPU cycles, such as continuous integration systems used by open source projects? https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas... How about the impact on critical infrastructure such as hospitals due to ransomware? https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/ransomware.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/ransomware.html Cryptocurrency isn't just a disaster, it's several disasters bundled together. Anyone working with it in any way, anyone who has a stake in cryptocurrency, has been compromised, and can no longer be trusted, just as your neighbor who is trying to sell you on their multilevel marketing scheme can no longer be trusted. (Did they invite you to dinner? Oh, surprise, it's just to sell you on their MLM again.) They are ignoring multiple dire ethical problems as they sell their relationship with you for funny money.

watrami 5y ago

I've been using Brave for a few years now in combination with ublock origin - as Brave just does not block everything that's annoying. I use duckduckgo and don't see a need to switch to Brave search. I primarily like the Brave sync feature, and it's actually the second main reason I recommend using Brave these days. It was quite junky when it was first released but by now it works like a charm for my 6 devices.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Same boat, but after using brave search, it really is better (IME).

neiman 5y ago

Between Google and Brave I prefer using Brave, but am I the only one bothered that this move is an abuse of power of a company that has both a browser and a search engine? We all know where this leads to.

lopis 5y ago
On new android devices in Europe, google was forced to let users select their preferred search engine from a randomized list of the 5-6 most popular options in that country. This could definitely come to browsers at some point. But then it's probably a death sentence to Firefox who needs to set Google as its search provider to survive.

sdfjkl 5y ago

Nice to see the search results look the same with and without Javascript enabled. Sadly not the image search. Surely this must be possible. We don't need inline previews.

thrdbndndn 5y ago

How good is it for non-English content?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

agilob 5y ago

No one talking about how fast a browser company can move if not dependent on money from Google?

jeroenhd 5y ago

You know what, I welcome a new search provider, even if it's by a cryptocurrency company. I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo. What I don't see is where Brave gets its image search results from. After Microsoft blatantly started serving the CCP by blocking queries for "tank man", which as far as I know they've never actually apologised for, just explained it as "a filter with more impact than expected" or some BS like that, I found out that most "competing" search engines bought all of their image search from Microsoft, leading to the same kind of censorship on platforms such as duckduckgo. Brave says it's using "third parties" to generate the results but I can't easily see which third party that would be. If they are using Bing like all the others, I wouldn't trust their image search engine in the slightest. Personally, I'll just assume they are for now, because they don't seem to clarify this further anywhere else. From what I can tell, there are four image/video search providers in the world: Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu. The rest all seem to license their results from one of the big four, mostly from Bing. When I need to pick from those four, I'll stick with Google; their censorship is relatively mild. I was hoping Brave Search would prove to be an alternative in this area, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

NoGravitas 5y ago
I'd honestly rather have a search provider run by the CPC than by a cryptocurrency company, though naturally I'd prefer neither.
- wubin 5y ago
  > I'd honestly rather have a search provider run by the CPC Any reason behind your preference? It baffles me to hear you'd rather use a heavily censored and CCP-controlled search provider than a search provider from a free market with an alternative business model.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    As @skyfaller posted elsewhere in this discussion: > Cryptocurrency isn't just a disaster, it's several disasters bundled together. Anyone working with it in any way, anyone who has a stake in cryptocurrency, has been compromised, and can no longer be trusted, just as your neighbor who is trying to sell you on their multilevel marketing scheme can no longer be trusted. (Did they invite you to dinner? Oh, surprise, it's just to sell you on their MLM again.) They are ignoring multiple dire ethical problems as they sell their relationship with you for funny money. Basically, any involvement with cryptocurrency is a strong signal of untrustworthiness and lack of scruples. Mere political censorship isn't in the same league.

Kiro 5y ago

I usually use something like "My Public IPv4 is" to see what IP address is in the index to derive what provider a search engine is using. However, Brave Search apparently does not even allow hard quotes and gives me random stuff related to IPv4. People keep saying that Google doesn't respect what you enter but for this query Google is the only one respecting it. DDG starts out with a few results matching it exactly but then goes off the rails with random results.

spiderfarmer 5y ago

What I hate about Brave Search is that their bot disguises as a regular user and they don't publish the IP addresses of their bot. You can't target it through robots.txt and you'll never know if you've blocked one of their IP's by mistake. Brave calls this a privacy feature. My ass.

paulcarroty 5y ago

Well, that's brave move! :) Already tried it several times and can share some experience: * searching 'npm flag xyz' - working fine * searching 'npm error some text' - just bad, a lot of non-relevant stuff. Anyway, it's naive to expect a real Google competitor right now.

jonathansampson 5y ago
Programming and code-related queries are definitely challenging. That being said, when we can improve (and there are definitely many opportunities to do so) we'd appreciate if you clicked the 'Feedback' link at the top of the results, and let us know what was off about the entries returned. Also, consider checking out Fallback Mixing (https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback) and the Web Discovery Project (https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project) for more on how we are working to improve Brave Search more efficiently.

afurculita 5y ago

I've been using Brave Browser for almost a year already. I fallback to Chrome when I can't get through some Recaptchas: this is the only annoying thing on Brave, you get a lot of Recaptchas that are invisible on Chrome and some are impossible to solve. I've also switched to Brave Search immediately when it come out. I'm satisfied with the search results I get for 90% of my queries, switching back to Google for the remaining 10%. My main problems with Brave Search are: 1. It doesn't have good localised results for non-english queries; here Google remains the best; 2. It doesn't have support for verbatim searching

dzhiurgis 5y ago

I've tried their search, it was ok, but my brain would get so stressed when not finding right info and would blame brave instead... Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google (and other engines)? The other problem with Brave is that crypto token integration in everywhere which feels more dystopian than Google's data gathering. And let's be honest - memory use after few days is same as Chrome's.

pmurt7 5y ago
"Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google (and other engines)?" Yes, simply add !g to your search query.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  That is like n steps: 1. Click on address field 2. Move cursor to start of field (cmd + left) 3. Shift + 1 to print bang, g Was hoping I could cycle thru bing/google/ddg/back to brave to quickly compare results. something like using wasd keys, no modifier.

nikkinana 5y ago

Great news. But nobody cares. And I'm shadow banned so fuck you.

cortexio 5y ago

a basic test shows that brave search, just like google search, prefers mainstream propaganda over true facts. I cant tell to which extend because it seems like brave search only allows me to see 2 pages of results. There's no next page button or on scroll update. duckduckgo seems to handle this better. But there are even better ones which im not going to mention because i dont want anyone to change them.

buggythebug 5y ago

That's rather brave of them

bob229 5y ago

Only a mad man uses any google product

pmurt7 5y ago

By the way, DuckDuckGo is no better than Google. DuckDuckGo said no. But when I reapplied as a black lesbian who can’t speak English, they wanted me: https://lulz.com/community/thread/social-experiment-duckduckgo-hiring-racial-discrimination/ https://lulz.com/community/thread/social-experiment-duckduck...

mlk 5y ago
just apply as a FtM trans

midrus 5y ago

I'm an extremely happy Brave user since last year, and my default search service is duckduckgo. Not missing neither chrome nor google search.

leoxv 5y ago

Just tried it out. Looks nice (except for that unremovable crypto button on the toolbar), but I need SpeechSynthesis (TTS) support. Will stay with FF and use MS Edge for its excellent TTS. The search engine is pretty weak judging from my initial queries.

gilrain 5y ago
The crypto button is removable. Have a look through your settings.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Specifically, brave://settings/?search=hide+brave+rewards+button

yonaguska 5y ago

For non-technical searches, mostly stuff relating to news, politics, or Covid, Google is next to useless at this point due to their attempts to combat misinformation. Even their autocomplete functionality guides potential search queries in an entirely unorganic manner. For instance, something may be trending according to google, while simultaneously being blacklisted as an autocomplete option- if it has Any elements of wrongthink about it.

ajvs 5y ago
Joe Rogan also commented on this cover-up a few days ago: > "Look, if I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to Duck Duck Go. I wasn’t finding them on Google,” Rogan urged. [1] https://summit.news/2021/10/19/video-joe-rogan-accuses-google-of-hiding-information-on-vaccine-deaths/ https://summit.news/2021/10/19/video-joe-rogan-accuses-googl...
- mehphp 5y ago
  It's sad that Joe Rogan comes up as any kind of authority on anything besides mixed martial arts.
  - symlinkk 5y ago
    Why do you need to be an “authority” to talk about what you saw with your own eyes on a search engine?
    - mehphp 5y ago
      You don't think it's dangerous for someone with a platform like Rogan has to spread misinformation? That's what I'm referring to.
      - infinitezest 5y ago
        Which of his claims are you asserting is misinformation?

new_realist 5y ago

Can I download Brave’s index and host it myself for truly private search?

atum47 5y ago

The last update broke the maximize button. But it's a good browser never the less.

rvz 5y ago

At least Brave has the courage to rid of Google as the default search engine, unlike Firefox.

orangepurple 5y ago

Friendly reminder that ungoogled chromium exists https://chromium.woolyss.com/ https://chromium.woolyss.com/

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This is work by the Cliqz team they bought out, primarily. Just to give credit where it's due

surajs 5y ago

Chromium based browser with attitude annoy me

howolduis 5y ago

are you still redirecting your users to referral links without their consent to make money in cryptocurrencies?

jonathansampson 5y ago
Brave never redirected users to referral links. We did have a bit of mistaken behavior in the browser's suggestion list. We offered affiliate codes as a way to support Brave development. If a user typed in a matching search term (e.g. Binance), our suggestion list would offer the affiliate link for the Binance site. This feature was intended for search input, but mistakenly matched fully-qualified URLs too (e.g. binance.us). We shipped a fix quickly, and turned the feature off by default. You can read more about that here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.

howolduis 5y ago

would be nice if you would display the number of results, this is a very helpful feature to me at least. I use it often to check if a phrase is grammatically correct or if one term is more popular than the other etc.

howolduis 5y ago

It's not clear whether users are opted-out the data collection by default or if this is something that we need to do manually. Looking at the settings, it looks like everyone is opted-in the data collection, and you have to manually opt-out, which is a nightmare for people like me who delete all browsing history, cookies, and data upon browser exit. I will stick with DuckDuckGo.

justfortechnews 5y ago
There's more info about this on the FAQ page: https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project

sharken 5y ago

Brave browser is my go-to Android browser and i hope this initiative works out for the best. One problem i regularly have is that the browser becomes unresponsive, e.g. won't update the screen. The only remedy is to close and open the browser. On second thought i should probably go see if this issue is widespread.

sadfev 5y ago

Brave is the last bastion of good open source commercial software. I will try to support them as long as they aren’t bankrupt.

ozten 5y ago

"brave aquires search company" - 4th SERP is accurate [1]. Not to shabby! 100% of results from Brave index. Congrats to Cliqz team. It is a shame that Brave / Cliqz couldn't work with DuckDuckGo to help them get onto an independent index, assuming they would want that, instead of competing. I think there was already a lot of overlap in customer mindshare. [1] https://search.brave.com/search?q=brave+aquires+search+company&source=web https://search.brave.com/search?q=brave+aquires+search+compa...

freediver 5y ago
You have a typo in your query (acquires) but strangely even with the correction first three results are irrelevant.
- ozten 5y ago
  Aproximately 100% of my searches include atlest one typo. Spellcheck is for the week.

princevegeta89 5y ago

Everyone making their own search engines these days. Notable mentions are the shady mobile browsers lol. None of these can even scratch what Google as a search engine is.