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Comment by elnygren | Hacker News Reader

Current title "Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google" seems quite misleading since there are plenty of private alternatives to Google (search engine) already ?

Especially for english speaking programming and news etc. searches, https://duckduckgo.com is really good.

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Brave multiple times has promoted PR with headlines like this, claiming they're the first for something.

They reek of gimmick and that tactic is gross, unauthentic.

most aspects of Brave are gross. Their very foundational tech is unethical.

DuckDuckGo uses bing for search.

From what I understand, DDG uses bing as a primary source, but they also pull data from numerous other sources, including their own crawler.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

You can choose what DuckDuckGo uses for search, including anonymous proxying of search queries to Google.

where can we do this? All searches result in "DuckDuck vs Google" , how ddg is better etc.

Private Search [1] works well too. </shameless>. That said, Brave is an awesome company headed by someone I look up to greatly. I'm definitely optimistic about their search product.

[1] https://private.sh/

I disagree with the decisions of Brave. I recently uninstalled the browser on my phone when it kept prompting me to enable crypto wallets and other things I don't care about. I just want a better alternative to Chrome.

Brave's obsession with crypto will be the death of them.

I've never had such an issue.

The only way I am able to avoid youtube ads on mobile is by using brave browser.

Also i'm very sure all the nuisances you describe can be disabled.

They can be disabled and have been, multiple times.

Each upgrade enables some new wallet on my homescreen or advertises some new coin exchange site (disabled both several times). One day, Twitter was randomly polluted with a "Tip" button next to each Tweet, it took me awhile to find how to disable that.

A real shame too, I did enjoy using Brave for the short couple of months I did use it but their constant upgrades that reenable crypto are just plain annoying.

Once again, Brave's obsession with crypto will be the death of them.

> it kept prompting me to enable crypto wallets and other things I don't care about.

I'm sure this will be fixed or can be disabled. I'm confident in Brave's passion toward its mission.

> Brave's obsession with crypto will be the death of them.

I have the opposite thought here. I believe that Brave's pioneering position in crypto will hedge the company front and center as we transition to newer, better internet protocols.

So do you look up to their misleading claims, you believe someone promoting lies is something to look up to greatly?

Fwiw, over the many years of trying it, I have never experienced Duck Duck Go search results to be anything but unusably poor quality unless I specify the google search engine, which, IMHO, is quixotic.

startpage.com as well.

Now owned by an advertisement / tracking company. No thanks.

It's not that bad: https://blog.privacytools.io/relisting-startpage/.

According to startpage, no. But if there's no difference then why buy it? It's still an anti privacy company owning a so-called privacy company. They should prove they are private with external reviews if they want trust.

With this reasoning, even external review will not help, because the company can change their practices right after the review.

DuckDuckGo and Brave are also owned by an ad company. Or do you see that differently?

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