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Comment by dantondwa | Hacker News Reader

In my desperate quest for a Google alternative, I've given Qwant a try, some time ago. In the end, it was the usual soup: Bing search results with a different brand. Not only that, but Qwant's UI was confusing and ugly. If France's search engine has to be an ugly Bing clone, than it might as well die. At least DuckDuckGo has a very nice interface.

I've started using Brave Search (invite only, for now) and I have to say I'm impressed. In general, I'm no Brave fan, as I am not sold on their BAT cryptocurrency and I do not want to use yet another Chromium browser, but I have to say that Brave Search (used with Firefox) has been a pleasant experience. The results are surprisingly accurate, even when looking for more technical things (an area where DuckDuckGo failed miserably, for me). Hopefully a new true alternative to Google and Bing will arise from it.

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

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

Really? That’s disappointing. Thanks for the heads up, I guess this explains why the results were good.

What exactly are you hoping for besides google, with some minor noise?

edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

I didn't say I was hoping for anything, just mentioning my observations.

>edit: assuming I'm reading this as you're just seeing the results as similar to google, not that they're coming from google itself

I'm very confident they're from Google, and they have acquired Cliqz who have a background of collecting results from Google.

If you actually use Brave Beta you'd see an option about including Google results.

Is it legal to scrape search results and use it in a competitive product?. Is this a legal grey area or its settled in court?

While Brave does turn many away with its built in cryptocurrency and its questionable userbase, it's a damn good browser. I switched from FF after the layoffs and in short it has better privacy, UX and feature set and all BAT functionality can be easily and completely disabled.

It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow down Google's plans.

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