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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 whet

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.
- arp242 5y ago
  DDG can give downright weird and irrelevant results, and sometimes (rarely) even returning with "noting matched your search". I hate it, but I have to fall back to Google quite often, and the results are consistently better; sometimes much better. I still have DDG as the default because it does work a lot of the time, and because it's easy to turn a search in to a Google search with !g, but I have to admit it's not all that good in comparison :-( To be honest I'm not sure if I would keep it as the default if it didn't have !g, and that's not a good look for DDG :-/ (I appreciate this is a very hard problem btw, so not even intended as a dig at DDG; just my experience with it)
  - rankun 5y ago
    I hear this criticism a lot and I always wonder whether that has something to do with either me not having a Google account and thus using the unpersonalized search, or simply with what I search for, but Google is almost always giving me worse results that DDG or, for that matter, any of the smaller competitors. Google seems to be filled with sponsored results that are only superficially relevant, and from page 2 onwards, it sometimes feels like whatever it’s giving me isn’t related to my search at all. Even when I’m very specific with my query, using +/- and quoted phrases.
    - arp242 5y ago
      Here's another one I had today: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=maan+leo&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=maan+leo&ia=web Maan Leo is a Dutch author. DDG gives me a few bad results about Maan Leo, a few bullshit links about horoscopes ("Make a Leo man chase you"), and finally the Wikipedia page for Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The Google search gives me results about, well, Maan Leo (in spite of using Indonesian search by the way – this GeoIP stuff Google does is so annoying). For this particular term, DDG is basically useless. The Brave search results also seem a lot better by the way. Certainly loads better than DDG.
    - arp242 5y ago
      I'm never logged in to Google, and don't even store cookies by default (although that may or may not be enough to prevent all tracking/personalisation, it's more than "the average" user and does seem to keep the worst out, not that personalisation is necessarily bad; the singular reason I have an account is because I actually like YouTube personalisation – without it I just get idiotic nonsense on the frontpage and now I get stuff I actually want to watch, although the old YouTube model of good categories was still better, but ah well). I wish I had taken some screenshots, here's the only recent one I have: https://i.imgur.com/b9hu2a9.png https://i.imgur.com/b9hu2a9.png – I was trying to find about Cambodian date writing conventions for some i18n code, but all DDG gave me was spam (and most likely, scam) results. Probably not the best search term in the first place ("Cambodian calender" would be better), but it's a decent example. I should keep a spreadsheet or something, but I'm too lazy for that. And it's not really all that interesting either.
suddenexample 5y ago
Well, I'd bet a big factor is that these spammy sites probably spend a lot of time on SEO - illuminating StackOverflow answers and official documentation don't.
- hiyer 5y ago
  True. If you search for any Python documentation the first links on Google are almost always geeksforgeeks, w3schools, etc instead of the official Python docs.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I think this is telling of how often the python docs actually solve peoples’ questions. For example, I searched “python string replace”, with the first 4 being tutorialpoint, w3schools, geeksforgeeks, stack overflow and at position 8 is the python docs. The issue with the python docs for this search is that it takes me to “built-in types”, and starts off with things totally irrelevant to what I want. I now have to go searching for string, then find the built-in method replace. Meanwhile, the other tutorial-esque websites almost all show an example of str.replace above the fold. If you’re Google and you’re trying to get people information faster, you’re going to promote the result that has more people not coming back to the search result page afterwards because it was hard to find the answer on that result.
    - sydthrowaway 5y ago
      Yup, python docs need to look at cppreference
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      I think string replacement in Python is a particularly egregious example because strings are core language types. Library docs are a lot better organized and a lot more easily indexed. This is just a problem with Python's docs in general, imo.
    - schmorptron 5y ago
      This is true, and if you want the docs you can always just add the word docs to your query. Expecting the search engine to always favor one thing seems like it'd work well in this case for some people, but in other cases might get mushy
sverhagen 5y ago
I wonder maybe every other day if I could delist W3Schools, by maybe always adding a negating query aspect to the URL. But this all doesn't seem easily supported, when I looked at it. Yep, hating on W3Schools with a passion. Younger self shot himself too often in foot with W3Schools.
- ROARosen 5y ago
  Just add the following in your Google search box: -w3schools.com
  - sverhagen 5y ago
    I meant doing so without adding it to every search. But, hey, I clearly didn't have enough faith in humanity... not only am I now able to find some extensions to generally mess with my search queries, there's extensions freakin' DEDICATED to filtering out W3Schools!!! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=w3schools https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=w3schools (Edit: that doesn't mean I necessarily trust or recommend niche extensions like these.)
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant. I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here? The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years is because for a large segment of users it works. And as someone else has pointed out the official documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online docs are close to worthless if you have a decent ide that shows you method signatures. PHP docs used to be a lot better in that they described what was going on and why and had comment sections that I imagine they also used as feedback to improve the docs. I haven't used PHP or Python for years but today there is Spring docs to drive me mad: telling me all the things I know and not telling me anything about how to interpret a Spring project. Spring is infinitely flexible and there are more ways to configure Spring than there are Spring programmers since most of them can't even configure two projects the same way ;-)
  - deleted 5y ago
jb1991 5y ago
I have personally found that when searching for developer documentation, as you mentioned, unfortunately nothing beats Google. I can always find what I’m looking for very quickly. But when I try DuckDuckGo, it’s a mess of irrelevant or weak pages.
- soco 5y ago
  I also noticed that, if DDG doesn't find it in my initial search, there's no way on earth I could game the search terms to actually find it. So if my first 1-2 searches give nothing I just add the !g...
  - jb1991 5y ago
    I’ve learned just cut out the entire exploratory first couple of steps and just always use !g when searching for anything developer related.
- ldng 5y ago
  It doesn't need to be better than Google, it just need to be better for its marketshare. If users are mostly dev, than it's a win.
- katsura 5y ago
  I noticed the exact same thing there. Usually, when I don't get results I just append !g after the search terms, and google yields much better results. But what I'm most bothered by DDG nowadays is that on my phone the first 2-3 results (which on a phone basically means the whole visible area) are quite frequently ads.
  - tagawa 5y ago
    It’s actually possible to switch off ads in the DuckDuckGo search settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings
    - katsura 5y ago
sanirank 5y ago
Haven’t used Brave Search yet, but I have not had the same issue it’s DDG. I use it as my primary search and it works the large majority of the time. I do resort to Google on rare occasions and am always amazed by all the blatant spam at the top of its results.
deleted 5y ago
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tommica 5y ago
I remember reading in HN an idea about allowing people to customize the weights used to filter search results - a search engine that provided that, where I could use some curated configuration file. Maybe I could have profiles like "cooking", "programming", "news" and help the search engine even better to understand my intent. Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into google results, and allow me a quick access to that list to manage it afterwards - ALSO, allow me to add a comment to remind myself WHY I did not want to see it anymore.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  https://felvin.com/ https://felvin.com/ is trying to build "Search profiles", but it's still quite early.
  - tommica 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing, gotta look into this!
- BarryMilo 5y ago
  This is where ad-based businesses show their ugly side: The more control you have over what you see, the fewer ways they have to slip you inconspicuous ads. This is why all content feeds like Facebook and Twitter get vaguer as time goes by, and it's why Google will never give up control over results unless it legally has to.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    It's also why every social network moved to an algorithmic feed. Had it remained chronological, our primitive brains would have noticed content from yesterday come up after a certain point, signaling to us that we are caught up and don't need to scroll further. Can't imagine how catastrophic that would be to their ad business.
    - ryantgtg 5y ago
mattwad 5y ago
This is really bad on Google too. I fixed it by installing an extension that lets me hide certain domains from results
- petepete 5y ago
  This used to be a built in feature. Being able to block ExpertsExchange from all searches was incredibly useful. Now I'd do the same for Pinterest, W3Schools and apidock.com
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Does it have a page two yet. When Brave search was launched and discussed on HN Brave search only had one page of search results. It was like five or ten results.
occamrazor 5y ago
Some years ago Google had the option to remove a website from search results. After a few months they discontinued. It would be nice to know why, if the user adoption was too low, the computational cost too high, or the user experience too bad because users inadvertently removed good results.
- topbanana 5y ago
  Commercial pressure seems the most likely to me
  - p-e-w 5y ago
    How would such "pressure" look in practice? Seems to me that every industry on the planet is at Google's mercy, not the other way round.
    - seqastian 5y ago
      How many google ads are on github or stack overflow compared to the other pages you find? They know exactly what every little change to the algorithm does to their bottom line.
      - jedimastert 5y ago
        Search doesn't have to concern itself with AdSense ads, search ads still make up something like %85 of Alphabet's total revenue
    - e3bc54b2 5y ago
      The worst sites a.k.a. those a user might want to block are probably also bringing Google disproportionally large amount of income is my guess.
- soco 5y ago
  I can imagine it was also a handy tool to DoS a site.
Abimelex 5y ago
> Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc. I have the same feeling, but using Google ;)
KronisLV 5y ago
How would you say that the Brave Browser and Brave Search compare with something like Firefox and DuckDuckGo (plus a plugin, like uBlock Origins), if you've used those? Anyone else care to comment? Personally, i'm still someone that's used more to Firefox and is more familiar with Mozilla due to them having been around for longer, but their recent decisions might make some people reconsider their choices and look into exploring new options.
- 5560675260 5y ago
  For browser biggest UI difference is tabs - they squeeze instead of scrolling. There are no plugins that can create a proper sidebar, but out of the box you can organise them into foldable groups. Search results are noticeably better, especially for non-english and location-specific results. What's worse is image search - unlike with text you tend to get only 2-3 good, relevant results, everything else is only somewhat related. I suggest giving it a try even if you'll decide against browser switch.
  - soundnote 5y ago
    Stock Chrome has a flag that activates a combined two-tab reading list + bookmarks sidebar. Brave has the same flag, but for some reason the sidebar didn't list bookmarks the last time I tried. There are actually flags for enabling tab scrolling if you want, and tab squeeze is also adjustable via flags.
    - 5560675260 5y ago
      Thanks, this really helped with a major pain point I had with tab management in Brave.
- soundnote 5y ago
  UI wise the big thing for me are tab groups. They are straight crack, and the stock Chromium implementation Brave inherits probably my favourite. Apart from that, the main thing you can't adjust via flags is Chromium's style of using separate browser profiles instead of Firefox's multiple containers within one profile/window/session. The bigger UI differences are on mobile, where again, tab groups are crack and the implementation excellent.
eloisius 5y ago
I just found a timely example of one of these sites that republish GitHub issues as their own content. Trying to understand a fairly specific Tensorflow error. Pasted an exact phrase query and the top result is gitmemory dot com. The content is horribly formatted, obviously just a low-effort scrape job. The author is attributed, but the link links to another page on this site that even says it just pull the data straight from GitHub's API. The footer links to another website, uonfu dot com. It looks even worse, and doesn't even try to attribute the original author of the content. https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22%27tensorflow.python.framework.ops.EagerTensor%27+object+has+no+attribute+%27batch%27%22 https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22%27tensorflow.python.fr... > If you are wondering where the data of this site comes from, please visit https://api.github.com/users/.../events https://api.github.com/users/.../events. GitMemory does not store any data, but only uses NGINX to cache data for a period of time. The idea behind GitMemory is simply to give users a better reading experience. Better reading experience, my ass.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  Yes, I hate it when I get results for that site. It also squeezes out the original github.com URL for that content from the search results, as you said, so I can't even solve it by writing an extension to hide it from search results. Luckily the original URL is easy to recover from its URL ( https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/26922 https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/26922 in your case), so I just copy the URL from the search result and fix it up manually.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    It's a little weird to blame a third party for Google's ranking choices.
- Proven 5y ago
  Worst shitsite on the web. It contains nothing useful, original or unique. I'd like to know what's Google's excuse for blacklisting that domain into oblivion. I have a greasemonkey script that blocks domains from being shown in GSE results. Works well, but I don't have it on all of my browsers.
p-e-w 5y ago
I don't understand why search engines don't fight SEO spam using simple, hardcoded rules for specific keywords. Surely, something like "if the search string contains the word 'python', rank results from 'python.org' above everything else" can't be difficult to implement? Granted, it's not a silver bullet for search engine spam in general, but even a few dozen rules like that would dramatically improve the quality of search results for a huge number of queries in practice.
- underwater 5y ago
  What about people who keep snakes as pets?
  - p-e-w 5y ago
    Their queries (such as "best food for reticulated python") are unlikely to have results from "python.org", so such rules would not affect them.
    - efskap 5y ago
      There's room for ambiguity. python egg, python length, python container, python types, python size, python lifespan
      - dash2 5y ago
        "For security, it is best to manage Python within its own dedicated container. Live Python in an unmanaged environment is unwise and can lead to resource strangulation. When objects are consumed by Python, this will affect their lifespan."
- kccqzy 5y ago
  I hate it to say it, but for CS beginners python.org isn't a good resource: it's simply too technical. Even for motivated students it will take them at least a few months of learning from a more beginner-friendly resource before the official docs on python.org make sense. That's not to mention the multitude of other materials on python.org other than the docs, like PEPs, pypi (third party libraries), bug reports, etc. Can you imagine a student searching for how to use a Python feature, but found a PEP illustrating the design of that language feature?
VortexDream 5y ago
I'm getting these sites with Google too, so I don't think it's just a Brave Search issue.
v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago
I doubt it would do much good to have a ban list. An entire industry is singularly focused on gaming search engines to promote whatever. It just so happens that blogspam sites are incredibly profitable in aggregate.
- eloisius 5y ago
  It still seems like such a simple technical problem to solve, albeit at large scale. Particular URL is blatant spam? Delist it. Keeps popping up on new URLs? Threaten to delist the hosting provider's address block. I'm more inclined to think that the reason these problems aren't solved is because there's little incentive to do it. The more time you spend milling around looking for what you're looking for, the more opportunities there are to show you ads.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Right, ad-driven search engines are fundamentally incentivized to provide results that are bad enough that you need to try harder to find your answer, but that are good enough for you not to switch (with a fairly high cognitive barrier to switching).
drcongo 5y ago
I filled in the beta signup form for Kagi search [0] the other day and one of the questions was along the lines of "What must-have feature do you need in a new search engine?", and my answer was the ability to blacklist these spam sites for the exact same reasons. The major search engines are becoming close to useless. [0] https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
- stOneskull 5y ago
  my answer was to rank sites higher the less ads they have
schmorptron 5y ago
That's an interesting observation and one I think rings true even though I haven't really actively noticed it. Stuff like tutorialspoint or w3schools is fine imo since they actually write their own content and add a but of beginner friendly explanation to it, but there's some blatant stack overflow copying that's been popping up. At least they have the option to report bad search results so they might be able to improve it in the future again.
christkv 5y ago
Just let me mark my results (and let me bookmark them) then let me search in that subset of bookmarks aswell as use them in your algo to improve general search.
amelius 5y ago
> 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). The irony is that Google wants all our information "to improve our user experience", except they don't want our ban lists.
- bradleyankrom 5y ago
  I can’t remember if it was a former feature of Google search or a Chrome extension, but that capability used to be available in Chrome. w3schools was on that list, among other republishers and whatnot. Loved it. Maybe someone else can augment my hazy recollection.
  - skymt 5y ago
    You're probably thinking of "Personal Blocklist", an official Chrome extension developed by Google. It's no longer available. https://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/18/blacklist-google-search-results-in-google-chrome/ https://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/18/blacklist-google-search-re...
    - amelius 5y ago
      Someone should inform https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ to update their site.
    - bradleyankrom 5y ago
      That’s the one! Thank you.
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      That actually sounds awesome. But the user in control? No wonder Google killed it ...
  - generallee5686 5y ago
    Yes! I swear I remember banning some of those spam domains in 2010 or so. IIRC, I thought it was part of Google search.
tyingq 5y ago
>I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list With Google, you can append -site:site1.com -site:site2.com to a query, though I don't know if it provides the same result as filtering them out after a query.
ignoramous 5y ago
> 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). neeva.com could do that for you for the price of a ~coffee ($4.95/month): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc2aTB24XmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc2aTB24XmI
- eloisius 5y ago
  I joined their waitlist and I eagerly await. If there's any kind of invitation scheme that speeds that process up, I'd be ever grateful.
freediver 5y ago
>I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list Brave discussed implementing similar concept called Goggles: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf Kagi Search already has customizable 'prefer' and 'mute' lists for domains, as well as customizable 'lenses' which are similar to goggles concept from Brave. (disclaimer: founder at Kagi) https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
- hbn 5y ago
  I'm not even sure how much manually blocking domains would help remedy the problem with Google results, which is that so much of the top hits are copy-pasted blog spam with very little information, scrambled together (very possibly by a non-human) purely to game SEO. It seems like it's gotten even worse just in the past few months. I'll try to Google something common, like "can you feed X to dogs" and all the results I find are these giant "articles" that aren't even about that specific thing. Instead it's a giant wall of text with commonly-Googled questions, and if you ctrl+F to the section you were looking for, the answer is usually horrible, and why should you be trusting information from this website anyway? Then you go back and click through other results and find an entirely different website with all the exact same text on it. Top recipe results are also all copy-pasted SEO spam surrounded by a wall of text about the history of the recipe, and how the author is a "country mom" (definitely not a man at a content farm in India), hiding the recipe deep within. They must be pumping out all these fake dedicated websites at such a high rate that blocking domains won't get you anywhere.
  - SllX 5y ago
    Sure it would help. Adblockers have had custom filter lists for years. If all you need to do is upload a text file every once in a while, that would go a long way to improving search results in general.
    - hbn 5y ago
      I didn't click into the paper, but I see now it also mentions crowdsourced filters. That would be much more effective than everyone creating their own blocklists
freewilly1040 5y ago
(tangent) It's hard to think of a website that wouldn't benefit from ban lists of some kind. Twitter's muted words feature is the predominant feature keeping me on the site. I wish something similar existed for this site, Reddit [1], even news sites like NYT (at some point I've listened to the POV of certain contrarian columnists and don't need to see their byline anymore). [1] I know you can do this via Reddit Enhancement Suite but it would be much better as a native feature that worked across clients
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Reddit is effectively used as a covert propaganda and advertising machine so its absolutely not in their interests to provide that functionality sadly.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results Same here. It's like they don't even care anymore. The results are just there to hold your interest so they can show some keyword ads along with them. I wish people would start maintaining curated web directories again.
- handrous 5y ago
  Google clearly gave up on fighting spam some time around '08 or '09. I think they realized it's expensive, and not actually good for business if the spammy stuff is using your own ads and/or analytics anyway. This is why almost all of the web looks like a shady spam-site if you don't have Adblock enabled. Google doesn't give a shit anymore.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Seems that way. Yet another reason not to feel any guilt when using uBlock Origin.
AJRF 5y ago
I would pay for a search engine that let me 1 click ban results from a given domain from showing up. I never want to see reddit, facebook, twitter or pinterest in my results.
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  Interesting. I find reddit results are some of the most useful results but maybe that's just related to my specific hobbies/searches.
howolduis 5y ago
Looking at the settings, it looks like everyone is opted-in the data collection by default, and you have to manually opt-out, which is a nightmare for people like me who delete their browsing data on browser exit. I will stick with DuckDuckGo.

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.

arp242 5y ago
DDG can give downright weird and irrelevant results, and sometimes (rarely) even returning with "noting matched your search". I hate it, but I have to fall back to Google quite often, and the results are consistently better; sometimes much better. I still have DDG as the default because it does work a lot of the time, and because it's easy to turn a search in to a Google search with !g, but I have to admit it's not all that good in comparison :-( To be honest I'm not sure if I would keep it as the default if it didn't have !g, and that's not a good look for DDG :-/ (I appreciate this is a very hard problem btw, so not even intended as a dig at DDG; just my experience with it)
- rankun 5y ago
  I hear this criticism a lot and I always wonder whether that has something to do with either me not having a Google account and thus using the unpersonalized search, or simply with what I search for, but Google is almost always giving me worse results that DDG or, for that matter, any of the smaller competitors. Google seems to be filled with sponsored results that are only superficially relevant, and from page 2 onwards, it sometimes feels like whatever it’s giving me isn’t related to my search at all. Even when I’m very specific with my query, using +/- and quoted phrases.
  - arp242 5y ago
    Here's another one I had today: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=maan+leo&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=maan+leo&ia=web Maan Leo is a Dutch author. DDG gives me a few bad results about Maan Leo, a few bullshit links about horoscopes ("Make a Leo man chase you"), and finally the Wikipedia page for Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The Google search gives me results about, well, Maan Leo (in spite of using Indonesian search by the way – this GeoIP stuff Google does is so annoying). For this particular term, DDG is basically useless. The Brave search results also seem a lot better by the way. Certainly loads better than DDG.
  - arp242 5y ago
    I'm never logged in to Google, and don't even store cookies by default (although that may or may not be enough to prevent all tracking/personalisation, it's more than "the average" user and does seem to keep the worst out, not that personalisation is necessarily bad; the singular reason I have an account is because I actually like YouTube personalisation – without it I just get idiotic nonsense on the frontpage and now I get stuff I actually want to watch, although the old YouTube model of good categories was still better, but ah well). I wish I had taken some screenshots, here's the only recent one I have: https://i.imgur.com/b9hu2a9.png https://i.imgur.com/b9hu2a9.png – I was trying to find about Cambodian date writing conventions for some i18n code, but all DDG gave me was spam (and most likely, scam) results. Probably not the best search term in the first place ("Cambodian calender" would be better), but it's a decent example. I should keep a spreadsheet or something, but I'm too lazy for that. And it's not really all that interesting either.

suddenexample 5y ago

Well, I'd bet a big factor is that these spammy sites probably spend a lot of time on SEO - illuminating StackOverflow answers and official documentation don't.

hiyer 5y ago
True. If you search for any Python documentation the first links on Google are almost always geeksforgeeks, w3schools, etc instead of the official Python docs.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I think this is telling of how often the python docs actually solve peoples’ questions. For example, I searched “python string replace”, with the first 4 being tutorialpoint, w3schools, geeksforgeeks, stack overflow and at position 8 is the python docs. The issue with the python docs for this search is that it takes me to “built-in types”, and starts off with things totally irrelevant to what I want. I now have to go searching for string, then find the built-in method replace. Meanwhile, the other tutorial-esque websites almost all show an example of str.replace above the fold. If you’re Google and you’re trying to get people information faster, you’re going to promote the result that has more people not coming back to the search result page afterwards because it was hard to find the answer on that result.
  - sydthrowaway 5y ago
    Yup, python docs need to look at cppreference
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I think string replacement in Python is a particularly egregious example because strings are core language types. Library docs are a lot better organized and a lot more easily indexed. This is just a problem with Python's docs in general, imo.
  - schmorptron 5y ago
    This is true, and if you want the docs you can always just add the word docs to your query. Expecting the search engine to always favor one thing seems like it'd work well in this case for some people, but in other cases might get mushy

sverhagen 5y ago

I wonder maybe every other day if I could delist W3Schools, by maybe always adding a negating query aspect to the URL. But this all doesn't seem easily supported, when I looked at it. Yep, hating on W3Schools with a passion. Younger self shot himself too often in foot with W3Schools.

ROARosen 5y ago
Just add the following in your Google search box: -w3schools.com
- sverhagen 5y ago
  I meant doing so without adding it to every search. But, hey, I clearly didn't have enough faith in humanity... not only am I now able to find some extensions to generally mess with my search queries, there's extensions freakin' DEDICATED to filtering out W3Schools!!! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=w3schools https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=w3schools (Edit: that doesn't mean I necessarily trust or recommend niche extensions like these.)
skinkestek 5y ago
Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant. I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here? The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years is because for a large segment of users it works. And as someone else has pointed out the official documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online docs are close to worthless if you have a decent ide that shows you method signatures. PHP docs used to be a lot better in that they described what was going on and why and had comment sections that I imagine they also used as feedback to improve the docs. I haven't used PHP or Python for years but today there is Spring docs to drive me mad: telling me all the things I know and not telling me anything about how to interpret a Spring project. Spring is infinitely flexible and there are more ways to configure Spring than there are Spring programmers since most of them can't even configure two projects the same way ;-)
- deleted 5y ago

jb1991 5y ago

I have personally found that when searching for developer documentation, as you mentioned, unfortunately nothing beats Google. I can always find what I’m looking for very quickly. But when I try DuckDuckGo, it’s a mess of irrelevant or weak pages.

soco 5y ago
I also noticed that, if DDG doesn't find it in my initial search, there's no way on earth I could game the search terms to actually find it. So if my first 1-2 searches give nothing I just add the !g...
- jb1991 5y ago
  I’ve learned just cut out the entire exploratory first couple of steps and just always use !g when searching for anything developer related.
ldng 5y ago
It doesn't need to be better than Google, it just need to be better for its marketshare. If users are mostly dev, than it's a win.
katsura 5y ago
I noticed the exact same thing there. Usually, when I don't get results I just append !g after the search terms, and google yields much better results. But what I'm most bothered by DDG nowadays is that on my phone the first 2-3 results (which on a phone basically means the whole visible area) are quite frequently ads.
- tagawa 5y ago
  It’s actually possible to switch off ads in the DuckDuckGo search settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings
  - katsura 5y ago

sanirank 5y ago

Haven’t used Brave Search yet, but I have not had the same issue it’s DDG. I use it as my primary search and it works the large majority of the time. I do resort to Google on rare occasions and am always amazed by all the blatant spam at the top of its results.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tommica 5y ago

I remember reading in HN an idea about allowing people to customize the weights used to filter search results - a search engine that provided that, where I could use some curated configuration file. Maybe I could have profiles like "cooking", "programming", "news" and help the search engine even better to understand my intent. Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into google results, and allow me a quick access to that list to manage it afterwards - ALSO, allow me to add a comment to remind myself WHY I did not want to see it anymore.

captn3m0 5y ago
https://felvin.com/ https://felvin.com/ is trying to build "Search profiles", but it's still quite early.
- tommica 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing, gotta look into this!
BarryMilo 5y ago
This is where ad-based businesses show their ugly side: The more control you have over what you see, the fewer ways they have to slip you inconspicuous ads. This is why all content feeds like Facebook and Twitter get vaguer as time goes by, and it's why Google will never give up control over results unless it legally has to.
- rchaud 5y ago
  It's also why every social network moved to an algorithmic feed. Had it remained chronological, our primitive brains would have noticed content from yesterday come up after a certain point, signaling to us that we are caught up and don't need to scroll further. Can't imagine how catastrophic that would be to their ad business.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago

mattwad 5y ago

This is really bad on Google too. I fixed it by installing an extension that lets me hide certain domains from results

petepete 5y ago
This used to be a built in feature. Being able to block ExpertsExchange from all searches was incredibly useful. Now I'd do the same for Pinterest, W3Schools and apidock.com

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Does it have a page two yet. When Brave search was launched and discussed on HN Brave search only had one page of search results. It was like five or ten results.

occamrazor 5y ago

Some years ago Google had the option to remove a website from search results. After a few months they discontinued. It would be nice to know why, if the user adoption was too low, the computational cost too high, or the user experience too bad because users inadvertently removed good results.

topbanana 5y ago
Commercial pressure seems the most likely to me
- p-e-w 5y ago
  How would such "pressure" look in practice? Seems to me that every industry on the planet is at Google's mercy, not the other way round.
  - seqastian 5y ago
    How many google ads are on github or stack overflow compared to the other pages you find? They know exactly what every little change to the algorithm does to their bottom line.
    - jedimastert 5y ago
      Search doesn't have to concern itself with AdSense ads, search ads still make up something like %85 of Alphabet's total revenue
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    The worst sites a.k.a. those a user might want to block are probably also bringing Google disproportionally large amount of income is my guess.
soco 5y ago
I can imagine it was also a handy tool to DoS a site.

Abimelex 5y ago

> Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc. I have the same feeling, but using Google ;)

KronisLV 5y ago

How would you say that the Brave Browser and Brave Search compare with something like Firefox and DuckDuckGo (plus a plugin, like uBlock Origins), if you've used those? Anyone else care to comment? Personally, i'm still someone that's used more to Firefox and is more familiar with Mozilla due to them having been around for longer, but their recent decisions might make some people reconsider their choices and look into exploring new options.

5560675260 5y ago
For browser biggest UI difference is tabs - they squeeze instead of scrolling. There are no plugins that can create a proper sidebar, but out of the box you can organise them into foldable groups. Search results are noticeably better, especially for non-english and location-specific results. What's worse is image search - unlike with text you tend to get only 2-3 good, relevant results, everything else is only somewhat related. I suggest giving it a try even if you'll decide against browser switch.
- soundnote 5y ago
  Stock Chrome has a flag that activates a combined two-tab reading list + bookmarks sidebar. Brave has the same flag, but for some reason the sidebar didn't list bookmarks the last time I tried. There are actually flags for enabling tab scrolling if you want, and tab squeeze is also adjustable via flags.
  - 5560675260 5y ago
    Thanks, this really helped with a major pain point I had with tab management in Brave.
soundnote 5y ago
UI wise the big thing for me are tab groups. They are straight crack, and the stock Chromium implementation Brave inherits probably my favourite. Apart from that, the main thing you can't adjust via flags is Chromium's style of using separate browser profiles instead of Firefox's multiple containers within one profile/window/session. The bigger UI differences are on mobile, where again, tab groups are crack and the implementation excellent.

eloisius 5y ago

I just found a timely example of one of these sites that republish GitHub issues as their own content. Trying to understand a fairly specific Tensorflow error. Pasted an exact phrase query and the top result is gitmemory dot com. The content is horribly formatted, obviously just a low-effort scrape job. The author is attributed, but the link links to another page on this site that even says it just pull the data straight from GitHub's API. The footer links to another website, uonfu dot com. It looks even worse, and doesn't even try to attribute the original author of the content. https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22%27tensorflow.python.framework.ops.EagerTensor%27+object+has+no+attribute+%27batch%27%22 https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22%27tensorflow.python.fr... > If you are wondering where the data of this site comes from, please visit https://api.github.com/users/.../events https://api.github.com/users/.../events. GitMemory does not store any data, but only uses NGINX to cache data for a period of time. The idea behind GitMemory is simply to give users a better reading experience. Better reading experience, my ass.

Arnavion 5y ago
Yes, I hate it when I get results for that site. It also squeezes out the original github.com URL for that content from the search results, as you said, so I can't even solve it by writing an extension to hide it from search results. Luckily the original URL is easy to recover from its URL ( https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/26922 https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/26922 in your case), so I just copy the URL from the search result and fix it up manually.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  It's a little weird to blame a third party for Google's ranking choices.
Proven 5y ago
Worst shitsite on the web. It contains nothing useful, original or unique. I'd like to know what's Google's excuse for blacklisting that domain into oblivion. I have a greasemonkey script that blocks domains from being shown in GSE results. Works well, but I don't have it on all of my browsers.

p-e-w 5y ago

I don't understand why search engines don't fight SEO spam using simple, hardcoded rules for specific keywords. Surely, something like "if the search string contains the word 'python', rank results from 'python.org' above everything else" can't be difficult to implement? Granted, it's not a silver bullet for search engine spam in general, but even a few dozen rules like that would dramatically improve the quality of search results for a huge number of queries in practice.

underwater 5y ago
What about people who keep snakes as pets?
- p-e-w 5y ago
  Their queries (such as "best food for reticulated python") are unlikely to have results from "python.org", so such rules would not affect them.
  - efskap 5y ago
    There's room for ambiguity. python egg, python length, python container, python types, python size, python lifespan
    - dash2 5y ago
      "For security, it is best to manage Python within its own dedicated container. Live Python in an unmanaged environment is unwise and can lead to resource strangulation. When objects are consumed by Python, this will affect their lifespan."
kccqzy 5y ago
I hate it to say it, but for CS beginners python.org isn't a good resource: it's simply too technical. Even for motivated students it will take them at least a few months of learning from a more beginner-friendly resource before the official docs on python.org make sense. That's not to mention the multitude of other materials on python.org other than the docs, like PEPs, pypi (third party libraries), bug reports, etc. Can you imagine a student searching for how to use a Python feature, but found a PEP illustrating the design of that language feature?

VortexDream 5y ago

I'm getting these sites with Google too, so I don't think it's just a Brave Search issue.

v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago

I doubt it would do much good to have a ban list. An entire industry is singularly focused on gaming search engines to promote whatever. It just so happens that blogspam sites are incredibly profitable in aggregate.

eloisius 5y ago
It still seems like such a simple technical problem to solve, albeit at large scale. Particular URL is blatant spam? Delist it. Keeps popping up on new URLs? Threaten to delist the hosting provider's address block. I'm more inclined to think that the reason these problems aren't solved is because there's little incentive to do it. The more time you spend milling around looking for what you're looking for, the more opportunities there are to show you ads.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Right, ad-driven search engines are fundamentally incentivized to provide results that are bad enough that you need to try harder to find your answer, but that are good enough for you not to switch (with a fairly high cognitive barrier to switching).

drcongo 5y ago

I filled in the beta signup form for Kagi search [0] the other day and one of the questions was along the lines of "What must-have feature do you need in a new search engine?", and my answer was the ability to blacklist these spam sites for the exact same reasons. The major search engines are becoming close to useless. [0] https://kagi.com https://kagi.com

stOneskull 5y ago
my answer was to rank sites higher the less ads they have

schmorptron 5y ago

That's an interesting observation and one I think rings true even though I haven't really actively noticed it. Stuff like tutorialspoint or w3schools is fine imo since they actually write their own content and add a but of beginner friendly explanation to it, but there's some blatant stack overflow copying that's been popping up. At least they have the option to report bad search results so they might be able to improve it in the future again.

christkv 5y ago

Just let me mark my results (and let me bookmark them) then let me search in that subset of bookmarks aswell as use them in your algo to improve general search.

amelius 5y ago

> 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). The irony is that Google wants all our information "to improve our user experience", except they don't want our ban lists.

bradleyankrom 5y ago
I can’t remember if it was a former feature of Google search or a Chrome extension, but that capability used to be available in Chrome. w3schools was on that list, among other republishers and whatnot. Loved it. Maybe someone else can augment my hazy recollection.
- skymt 5y ago
  You're probably thinking of "Personal Blocklist", an official Chrome extension developed by Google. It's no longer available. https://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/18/blacklist-google-search-results-in-google-chrome/ https://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/18/blacklist-google-search-re...
  - amelius 5y ago
    Someone should inform https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ to update their site.
  - bradleyankrom 5y ago
    That’s the one! Thank you.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    That actually sounds awesome. But the user in control? No wonder Google killed it ...
- generallee5686 5y ago
  Yes! I swear I remember banning some of those spam domains in 2010 or so. IIRC, I thought it was part of Google search.

tyingq 5y ago

>I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list With Google, you can append -site:site1.com -site:site2.com to a query, though I don't know if it provides the same result as filtering them out after a query.

ignoramous 5y ago

> 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). neeva.com could do that for you for the price of a ~coffee ($4.95/month): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc2aTB24XmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc2aTB24XmI

eloisius 5y ago
I joined their waitlist and I eagerly await. If there's any kind of invitation scheme that speeds that process up, I'd be ever grateful.

freediver 5y ago

>I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list Brave discussed implementing similar concept called Goggles: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf Kagi Search already has customizable 'prefer' and 'mute' lists for domains, as well as customizable 'lenses' which are similar to goggles concept from Brave. (disclaimer: founder at Kagi) https://kagi.com https://kagi.com

hbn 5y ago
I'm not even sure how much manually blocking domains would help remedy the problem with Google results, which is that so much of the top hits are copy-pasted blog spam with very little information, scrambled together (very possibly by a non-human) purely to game SEO. It seems like it's gotten even worse just in the past few months. I'll try to Google something common, like "can you feed X to dogs" and all the results I find are these giant "articles" that aren't even about that specific thing. Instead it's a giant wall of text with commonly-Googled questions, and if you ctrl+F to the section you were looking for, the answer is usually horrible, and why should you be trusting information from this website anyway? Then you go back and click through other results and find an entirely different website with all the exact same text on it. Top recipe results are also all copy-pasted SEO spam surrounded by a wall of text about the history of the recipe, and how the author is a "country mom" (definitely not a man at a content farm in India), hiding the recipe deep within. They must be pumping out all these fake dedicated websites at such a high rate that blocking domains won't get you anywhere.
- SllX 5y ago
  Sure it would help. Adblockers have had custom filter lists for years. If all you need to do is upload a text file every once in a while, that would go a long way to improving search results in general.
  - hbn 5y ago
    I didn't click into the paper, but I see now it also mentions crowdsourced filters. That would be much more effective than everyone creating their own blocklists

freewilly1040 5y ago

(tangent) It's hard to think of a website that wouldn't benefit from ban lists of some kind. Twitter's muted words feature is the predominant feature keeping me on the site. I wish something similar existed for this site, Reddit [1], even news sites like NYT (at some point I've listened to the POV of certain contrarian columnists and don't need to see their byline anymore). [1] I know you can do this via Reddit Enhancement Suite but it would be much better as a native feature that worked across clients

breakfastduck 5y ago
Reddit is effectively used as a covert propaganda and advertising machine so its absolutely not in their interests to provide that functionality sadly.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results Same here. It's like they don't even care anymore. The results are just there to hold your interest so they can show some keyword ads along with them. I wish people would start maintaining curated web directories again.

handrous 5y ago
Google clearly gave up on fighting spam some time around '08 or '09. I think they realized it's expensive, and not actually good for business if the spammy stuff is using your own ads and/or analytics anyway. This is why almost all of the web looks like a shady spam-site if you don't have Adblock enabled. Google doesn't give a shit anymore.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Seems that way. Yet another reason not to feel any guilt when using uBlock Origin.

AJRF 5y ago

I would pay for a search engine that let me 1 click ban results from a given domain from showing up. I never want to see reddit, facebook, twitter or pinterest in my results.

RandallBrown 5y ago
Interesting. I find reddit results are some of the most useful results but maybe that's just related to my specific hobbies/searches.

howolduis 5y ago

Looking at the settings, it looks like everyone is opted-in the data collection by default, and you have to manually opt-out, which is a nightmare for people like me who delete their browsing data on browser exit. I will stick with DuckDuckGo.