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Comment by lowkeyokay | Hacker News Reader

> I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand.

Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different though. When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

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Honestly the main reason I ended up abandoning DDG is because you can't see the publish date on search results.

I know it's a fairly minor feature and one manipulated often by some websites, but I've still found it massively increases my chances of picking a relevant and up to date result. I didn't even realise how much I used it until I found myself getting extremely frustrated about its absence in DDG.

I used to do this, but at some point I just stopped. Google is not better than DDG. More SEO spam and much more hostile UX.

Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX too so I don’t have any big hopes for this. I like the idea of paying for a search engine, though. I would seriously consider that if DDG offered it.

Why not try Neeva? They are going the route of a paid search engine.

Upvoted, but here is the reason why I don't use it, some people haven't yet fully realized that Internet doesn't have borders:

> We will be in touch when we are ready to release Neeva in your country. Thank you for being part of the Neeva team, we are so excited to build the future of search with you.

I’m using Neeva. I like the team and the idea, but at least for me there is a drastic drop off in search quality from google. It is pretty far from 95% as good.

Can you elaborate on how you feel "Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX"? You're not talking about the first version of the User Tipping feature from 2018 (where Brave gave BAT to its users and asked them to give mark which creator(s) they'd like to support) are you?

Generally the same type of problems as a lot of UX has today, especially on mobile: various messages and modals and controls that seem to be motivated by Brave’s needs, not mine. Sponsored images, trying to get me to set it as standard browser, “Brave rewards” whatever that is being a permanent part of the UI and turning itself on without me asking it to.

These might be small things compared to Google, but I’ve never experienced that DuckDuckGo did anything like it, so my trust in them is higher.

Let me expand a little on why I think this is so corrosive to my trust in Brave, because this is interesting stuff. When I use the Brave browser, I have to second-guess everything in the UI to consider why a control or message is there, if it’s in my interest or if you’re trying to get me to do something that’s in your interest. My eyes have to scan the UI in much the same way I do with ads in search results or spam in my inbox; having to actively filter out the potential harms from the things that are useful.

It’s like I can feel my eyes getting more tense as I do this.

That means that every single time I use the browser, the impression that Brave should not be trusted is reinforced in a very physical way. It’s not just a “brand impression” but a muscle memory.

Yep, agreed. I ended up switching to Firefox as a result of things like this, which was good in many ways but took a lot more configuration.

> Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX

Yep. The missteps that they've made over the past few years do not give me any confidence in the future of the project.

What missteps? The only notable UX issue we've had was years ago, and was a matter of naïve design. When we were made aware of the issue, it was corrected within 48 hours. Hard to portray that as a "culture of hostile UX".

Maybe you could start by listening instead of accosting every comment that you find. Your incessant reply-bombing is childish and unprofessional, nobody wants to engage with someone who defends a browser like it's their sole lifeline.

Furthermore, you don't get to choose what your "UX issues" are. "UX" quite literally stands for "users experience", which is on the other side of the spectrum from "developer experience". As a dev myself, I know it's difficult not to conflate the two, but acting like issues straight up don't exist is blatantly hostile.

I have no personal qualms against Brave. I'm just another developer who wants a browser, and Brave's naive featureset doesn't appeal to me: that's fine. I'm just helping other, similar users make the right choice.

I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate, I'll post a response.

Regarding user experience, I'm not just a developer of Brave, but I'm a user also ;-) Not only that, but I spend a lot of time speaking with users all across the Web, so as to understand how they're using Brave, what works, and what doesn't. I do feel uniquely qualified to talk about matter of UX when it comes to Brave.

> I'm responding to users.

I'm gonna have to agree with GP that you're responding too much. I don't even use Brave nor do I care but I still browse HN. Obviously different people will see things differently, but you seem very defensive and it makes you come across as difficult.

Like I said, I have no skin in this game. You are welcome to ignore what I say if you don't find it helpful.

Since you seem to know it all I'll just leave you be. My only actionable advice is that you should hire someone nicer to handle public relations, lest you bleed users from your own mouth.

I do believe I've been quite respectful with you. If at any time I was caustic, abrasive, or offensive, I apologize. It is certainly not my intention.

From my read through the thread, you're being very nice, but also very dismissive. That's not actually respectful, even if it's not the harsh things you describe. And it's not kind. If you disagree with someone's experience that you feel passionately about defending, you might have better luck defending it by taking a moment to think about what they experienced differently from your own experience, how much you care about that different experience, and how you might incorporate that into future action. Not everything needs public relations, and it can definitely feel uncaring if it's mostly public explainings.

People are too sensitive nowadays. Everything needs to be wrapped silk and the actual information gets shrouded by fluff.

It’s not clear who you’re saying is being too sensitive, or why you think so.

People who think it's disrespectful when a company representative do not preface every response with "I deeply apologize that you feel this way" or some equivalent nonsense. You even claim responding to something inaccurate is user hostile.

I respect the candid comments from the Brave Dev. I wish all "PR departments" acted like this to be honest.

Huh? I wasn’t suggesting the person should apologize. I was suggesting they should ask about the user’s experience rather than telling it.

Or they can just tell them facts instead of pretending to care what a random hater thinks. Just like they did. They also asked what bad UX they referred to, so they did what you wanted but it was still disrespectful apparently. If genuine feedback was met with "go fuck yourself" we could maybe call it user hostility but this was not.

I feel like pretending to listen, which is what he is doing, is worse than saying "go fuck yourself" because then it would be honest. I find it bizarre you find his feedback genuine, as to me it's the same thing as "go fuck yourself" but neatly wrapped up in a "I pretend to care what you say" format.

If he came straight out and said "I don't care about your opinion and here's why" I would respect him. Instead he just talks over the people he's pretending to listen to.

His job should be to solicit feedback, not dictate it. And if he's going to dictate it I wish he would at least be upfront about it.

You put it better than I could have before I got back to this. It doesn’t really count as “asking” if you’re preemptively dismissing the answer in the same comment.

I don’t use Brave but I think these guys are being unfair. Your comments are generally fine because they’ve prompted responses with detail, which I as a third party prefer.

“Brave is full of UX issues” <<< “Brave allows withdrawing BAT to only a single wallet provider”.

Okay, the latter comment is way more useful to me, a lay follower than the former. And it only happens because you pushed.

> I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate, I'll post a response.

I’m not posting this in fight mode, I sincerely hope it will help: this is user hostile.

You’re responding but you’re not listening. You’re certainly not asking. How could you be sure you know what the other people you interact with think if you feel uniquely qualified to talk about users’ experience and just brush by people who don’t feel supported in their own experience?

I see you put the twit in twitter.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I haven't noticed any UX issues, great job on the browser, looking forward to the search engine. Thanks.

I'd say only allowing BAT withdrawal to a single hosted wallet provider that requires KYC is a pretty significant UX issue.

That’s not hostile, it’s literally a requirement in the US for crypto.

Maybe that's a sign that we should keep our browser and crypto wallets as separate entities, no?

Yea, but I mean who would want to cash out their pennies earned anyways. Only businesses/creators should be cashing out and they would need to KYC for any normal donations. Users should be just donating their pennies to creators and websites, which doesn’t take any KYC.

This was only a year ago and not a great look - https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/

After using the duck for a couple of years, I have become better at two things:

- Reading man pages or official documentation sites before opening a search engine

- Thinking of more precise search keywords, as I got used to duck not helping me as much as google

Along these lines I use ddg’s bangs for the same benefit. So many searches for Python help are filled with very shallow intros on tutorial sites of varying quality with the official docs rarely the first result.

Now I just prefix my query with !py and I’m immediately taken to the docs.

Brave Search supports !bangs ;)

Indeed, including nearly all of DDG's !bangs :) We also add in some others, such as !so for StackOverflow, !gh for GitHub, and !mdn for the Mozilla Developer Network.

Those are also in DDG.

Wouldn't surprise me; DDG has an impressive list of !bangs (more than 13K, IIRC). Thanks for the clarification!

And is there any list of all available bangs + also do we have an ability to add new ones?

Tip it lacks keyboard shortcuts to navigate search results (up/down, enter).

Arrow and PgUp/Dn keys scroll the page, as per standard Web UI. Tab key jumps from one link to the next, also as per standard Web UI. Maybe they changed that between our comments.

That works horribly on the results page, around 10 tabs to get to the first result.

That’s good to know!

For clarity, I wasn’t trying to say DDG is better than Brave, rather agreeing with the parent that there are smarter tools for gathering information rather than relying solely on a search engine.

also: considering how far out in the long tail of search terms my query is, before choosing to go with the !g bang out of the gate.

Google I find is still better for topics that are more idiosyncratic. But the bang syntax makes DDG a natural choice as default because many times I'll want to go directly to a specific domain search, e.g. !r or !nyt

> Is 95% really not acceptable?

No: When you use web search for professional work, such as searching for error messages or description of bugs of some software, any miss of somebod having encountered and solved them before can cost you days of work.

From my experience, Google is currently still the best at finding those.

I use DDG on personal devices and Google at work. I have a work-issued Google account, so privacy isn't really tractable for work stuff anyway

I think before you spend days of work on something DDG can't find, taking a few seconds to add !g and check Google's results would be sensible. Usually when I try that, though, Google isn't any better.

> When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better

This is exactly my experience. I have a "failed" search probably about a quarter of the time. Changing around the keywords can sometimes fix those failures... maybe about a quarter again are still stuck. So, yeah, ~5% failure rate. I inevitably try !g and am inevitably disappointed with effectively the same results (or lack thereof). Google successfully recovers a failed search maybe 10% of the time.

> Is 95% really not acceptable?

Moreover, is any search engine really at 95% success rate? I certainly have never gotten that high with Google, even back in the days when Google Search was good. Nowadays it's like 85% or so. About the same as DuckDuckGo for me. No matter which one I made my default, I'd have to check the other occasionally. (Incidentally, the same is true of satellite imagery. Sometimes Bing Maps is just much better for no obvious reason.)

It isn't acceptable, no. I tried Duck Search (aka Bing) for a couple weeks and in the beginning I wouldn't know that I wasn't getting the results I was looking for and eventually realized that the results just sucked compared to Google.

I found myself having to second guess the results and then did a Duck / Google hybrid for a while, going to Google when I didn't get what I was looking for and eventually it was too much friction. I equate it with when I used to use two different text editors, one for speed (Sublime) and another (IntelliJ)for step-debugging because Sublime didn't have that part well implemented and it was just maddening to have to switch back and forth all the time and learn/maintain two sets of keyboard shortcuts etc.

> When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g

I use !sp instead, same results and no Google tracking

(!sp searches on Startpage which in turn uses results from Google; according to both Privacy Badger and Brave Shields there are no trackers on SP)

I sometimes wonder if that 5% is something DDG and others can realistically solve. Perhaps the issue has less to do with engineering and more to do with Google being the dominant player over the previous 20-years (give or take). That's an awfully long time for one company to effectively own a product category and build expectations among users about how it should work.

FWIW I do get good results from DDG (sometimes better than Google) but that does require me to be a bit more thoughtful with my queries.

For me it's random technical dumb stuff, like library version compatibility. Or a specific syntax I know exist but I can't figure out.

Now when I don't find what I need, I double check with g! ... once every 2 or 3 times, google do find what I'm vaguely remember exist and is out there.

Is never actual content, it's when I look for a specific one liner to copy paste and DDG do not deliver.

I can live with that.

I am on the third or forth trial to change to DDG and this time it is working not because DDG is better but because Google's search is degrading so much.

I tried brave search today and the results were rather good. I have no idea what 95% working means but this is a nice start

In my experience, without use of g! DDG isn't serviceable.

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