Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser | Hacker News Reader

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

brave.com

738 pointsskellertor534 comments

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).

> 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.

Goggles is coming. https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf

pinterest. Bane of all image searches.

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.

They sure want to improve their own user experience. The "use your information to make tons of money" experience.

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.fr...

> If you are wondering where the data of this site comes from, please visit 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.

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 in your case), so I just copy the URL from the search result and fix it up manually.

On the other hand, I actually like the fact that such mirror sites exist, because they often have content that's disappeared from the original for whatever reason. The name GitMemory is itself suggestive of that.

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.

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.

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.

There's a Chromium extension, uBlacklist, that does something similar. You can blacklist sites from search results and also whitelist so those are highlighted.

Brave put out a white paper regarding a version of this.

Have they followed up with a product/feature?

It was the only portion of brave’s approach that was interesting to me. It’d be disappointing if they dropped it.

Brave Goggles: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf

This is actually doable. There's a tweak to PageRank you can do (that's as old as the original paper[1]) that allows you to bias the ranking toward a certain set of websites. It works really well.

While it's probably unfeasible (or at least really expensive) to do completely personalized rankings, that's just too much data, but segmenting off into areas like academia, blogosphere, tech, etc. is quite doable, and as the authors remark, this approach is highly resilient to manipulation from commercial interests.

[1] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf

> Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into google results,

millionshort.com has a "block this domain" option. It can be useful to combine it with the filter "hide results from top 1,000 sites".

Searx can make you do exactly that. It's really easily to get started with a self hosted serverand then you can customize it the way you want.

I use Neeva.com and I think one of their features resembles this idea. It is a paid for search engine though.

Kagi Search has "lenses". I have a "Programming", "News 360" lens (news from all sides), HN lens, PDF/Whitepaper lens...

You can see how it works here:

https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1445298385800470529

(disclaimer: Kagi founder)

https://felvin.com/ is trying to build "Search profiles", but it's still quite early.

Yahoo had a system along time ago where you could slide results more toward shopping or more toward informational. Like most features like that, it didn't last very long.

>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

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

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.

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.

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...

Same thing with bing. It's a fine search engine for lots of things, but for searching documentation it's really weak, showing sites like w3schools and tutorialspoint far above the results I actually want.

It kind of makes sense that w3schools would spend much more time on the SEO game than docs.python.org, but it just drives me back to google

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.

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.

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.

Like most features that Google releases, I believe that they use them to train their algorithms and once they get enough human input on a feature from people using it, they remove the feature and turn it over to the machine. We see it on the SEO side all the time. Release a feature, call it a ranking factor, thousands of SEOs jump all over it. The algo learns and then the features importance is removed. NoFollow links are a great example of this.

Commercial pressure seems the most likely to me

I'd put my money on performance costs.

Personal remove lists basically turn each query from each person with such a list into a completely distinct query, which breaks caching on multiple levels. If a few people are using such a feature or if people sometimes add a couple -sites to a query, no big deal, but if enough people used it with basically unique site lists, the performance degradation would probably make a rollback of the feature inevitable.

I can imagine it was also a handy tool to DoS a site.

Adding a minus sign in front of a site: specifier still works for me (eg "google -site:google.com"). Works on DDG, too.

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.

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)

DDG also just uses the bing search API for all their results seemingly. They claim to use other sources as well, but in the tests I conducted building Kagi last year, it was always identical to bing. They must have a special deal with microsoft because the API fees at that volume are completely unsustainable, as in the operating costs are 5-10x the theoretical profits from advertising. If they were actually scraping, this wouldn't be a thing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...

It's also horrible for non English content from my experience.

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.

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?

What about people who keep snakes as pets?

I think you’re broadly talking about site authority which is something search engines absolutely do, I imagine it’s a non trivial thing to get right and the scope of doing it manually for every topic on the planet is probably not going to be easy.

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.

> 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.

(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

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.

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

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

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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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

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.

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.

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.

> Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc.

I have the same feeling, but using Google ;)

The spam google has for this is outrageous.

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.

Brave has bought a search company that became what is now "Brave Search". They are using their own index.

The "third-parties" bit, IIUIC, is the part when their index does not give good results and it falls back to working like startpage: they send the anonymized query to Google/Bing and take the results to send to the user. I believe that the idea is that they can use this as a way to improve their own index.

They also show on the results page how much of the results are coming from them vs from third-parties [0]

[0]: https://search.brave.com/help/independence

This is true for their normal search, but for their image search they always seem to say "results from third parties" if you click the info button.

Maybe their image search just hasn't encountered enough websites featuring the word "bird" or maybe their disclaimer is shown more often than intended, but I get the idea that image search is always done externally.

For me, Brave being a crypto company is a plus.

While I don't think much about BAT, having a browser with a nice wallet integration is a huge step forward in making Web3/DApps more useable for non-technical people.

It's still a long way, but I think this is one of the first big steps in the right direction.

> I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo

Weird. I have found Qwant giving better results than ddg. (No affiliation)

What is weird is that there is one small change that would likely make any of these engines outperform others in everyday usage. Just let me (easily) blacklist domains in my results.

I often want to block domains. If you give me one more pinterest link...

They are indeed using Bing:

>However for some features, like searching for images, Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing.

Source: https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&atb=v156-1&iax=images&ia=... seems fine to me.

If you are referring to it being blocked in China, well, are we at all surprised that private companies kowtow to autocratic regimes in favor of making more money?

It seems fine now.

But the tank man image was blocked for the whole world and not just china. So they fixed this after an public outcry.

But you do not know, what is missing now. Thats a reason for me to not trust them anymore.

> the tank man image was blocked for the whole world

The top story at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635

No, we're not referring to it being blocked only in China. It was blocked on 4th June worldwide by all search engines that rely on Bing (DDG, Qwant, Ecosia, ...)

You can see them returning no results for "tank man" from the web archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398376

> I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo.

Why? (I use the latter.)

> Microsoft blatantly started serving the CCP by blocking queries for "tank man"

Works fine for me [1].

[1] https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man&form=HDRSC2&fi...

DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Yahoo, etc. they all rely on Bing (Some only for images)[1].

> Works fine for me

Not on June 4th[2] (the date when the Tiananmen Square massacre ended). Microsoft "fixed" it after the backlash.

[1]: https://www.searchenginemap.com/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398376

It was temporarily censored around a critical time, and there was also some bullshit explanation floating around.

See the last paragraph in the Censorship section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#Censorship

I thought Yandex also used Bing for image search?

Ya when I do image search in Yandex at the bottom it says Search: Bing Google

I think they stopped doing it long time ago (and I cannot see these links now), but if my memory serves me well basically these links were taking you to Google and Bing with the same query, respectively. I.e. they were directly linking to competitors, just in case your original search at Yandex was not satisfactory.

Oh, possible, they weirdly disappear as I scroll down and don't have time to click them.

Do you welcome a search provider run by a bigoted anti-mask anti-vaxx nutjob?

Because that's what Brave is.

I'd honestly rather have a search provider run by the CPC than by a cryptocurrency company, though naturally I'd prefer neither.

> 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.

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.

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.

I read this as "I can't find stuff because Google blocks misinformation".

Every time I search for politics, news, or covid related stuff I find it straight away. News it right at the top with multiple articles available.

Politics and COVID I find the offical source straight away.

I read this as "Google is perfectly capable of determining the truth".

Moving from an era of media oligopoly into the internet age was very hopeful IMO, and now it's bottlenecked by even fewer companies.

> I read this as "Google is perfectly capable of determining the truth".

Well, OP was the one that defined the info they were looking for as misinformation as far as I can tell.

And then I stated I could find offical sources for politcs and COVID. These are not Google's opinions but simply a fact. WHO, RKI, CDC, etc are all offical sources of information for COVID, etc. This is not them define what is true or false but merely providing me with the offical information so I can educate myself.

I’m generally happy with Google’s results as well, but I also acknowledge that both of our experiences could be a symptom of us wanting to see the things Google that has not labeled as misinformation and it would be harder to detect subtle missing perspectives that might be being downranked if the results shown are generally pleasing to us.

In case you haven't noticed, HN has a strong extremely conservative contingent. The person you replied to is one of them.

The giveaway is them ranting about "groupthink" and "censorship" from autocomplete.

Scroll down to see people citing Joe Fucking Rogan and spewing misinformation about vaccines.

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-googl...

It's sad that Joe Rogan comes up as any kind of authority on anything besides mixed martial arts.

Why do you need to be an “authority” to talk about what you saw with your own eyes on a search engine?

I can find info about vaccine-related injuries fine on Google. It's actually easier than on DDG:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=covid+vaccine-related+injuries

https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+vaccine-related+injuri...

I'm assuming he's just upset that blogspam that inanely conflates VAERS with evidence of injuries actually related to COVID vaccines shows up higher on DDG because that reinforces his false presuppositions.

You do know that Google does search bubbling, so your results aren't the same as anyone else's, right?

"I could find it on Google" is exactly as (in)valid as "It works on my machine"

He said "I'm looking for very specific people and very specific cases" in the following sentence. He's not referring to generic anecdotes.

For reference, a picture of the results: https://i.judge.sh/forked/Party/chrome_TpfzKRLp5k.png

And he would know because why? He’s a loud personality with an audience.

can you give a specific example?

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.

Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) makes $3 million a year, and Mozilla asks you to donate "to help a nonprofit organization".

"On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

"By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."

This lady then goes on and on talking about "social justice".

Also Google deal produces 90% of Mozilla's revenue. I would say Mozilla is really controlled opposition.

Mozilla has been prioritizing activism while the main product that brings the cash in falls behind. If the current trend continues, Mozilla will cease to exist. In a normal company, it should be focused on fixing this ASAP, but Mozilla seems contend continuing as is.

Does anyone know who actually controls the direction of the organization? How are the board members chosen/elected? Is there a way for the general public to pick other board members?

Importantly: The donations go to Mozilla Foundation, not to its for-profit subsidiary Mozilla Corp. MozCorp is who develop Firefox, the Foundation focuses more on political activism. If you want to help fund the people developing Firefox, one of the Corporation's paid products is the place to send your money.

Why is Mozilla Foundation doing political activism? Is it just some money-grabbing scheme or what?

Mitchell Baker's blog:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/author/mitchellmozillacom/

Not a single word about Firefox, just some far-left propaganda about racial justice, empowered women in tech, Trump bad, and so.

ah yes, the coronavirus...the thing that made everybody not use the internet

FWIW, I had been using Firefox since it was called “Mozilla” and I switched to Brave last year. Firefox under her “leadership” is a disaster.

"...That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

Can anyone explain what this actually means? It sounds like she's saying that taking a lower pay by 5x is too much to ask of her, but then "people and their families" doesn't make any sense, because its 1 person and 1 family.

Thats not even getting into how true is may or may not be, or how its still a lot of money overall, even if its not compared to the market overall.

I read it as, "that's too big a discount to ask [qualified CEO candidates] and their families to commit to."

In other words: good luck finding a qualified person to run Mozilla.

How much do CEOs at similarly sized tech corporations get paid? It's fine to say you dislike the current CEO's performance, but I don't see how her compensation is relevant without other datapoints to compare to.

Based on this I will start using Brave.. at least it's the devil you know

Well, you know, Brendan Eich was CEO of Mozilla and they were flying high.

Then he got cancelled, and with it was cancelled the dream of having a real platform that can compete with Google. (Brave, with all of its advantages, is still a fork of Chrome and in that way promotes the Chrome monopoly.)

Since then, the new CEO of Mozilla has made herself a lot of money, and she seems perfectly happy to destroy the long term viability of the company for some quick injections of cash that can justify her bonuses.

And Eich single-handedly created the only other viable browser in the market starting from scratch [market wise, not technology wise]. Yet, somehow, people still think this was better than leaving Eich as head of Mozilla.

>they were flying high.

Per StatCounter, Mozilla's market share decline started in early 2010 (including mobile, late 2010 for desktop only) and Eich was fired (resigned, but that's BS) in early 2014.

Eich was still at Mozilla (not CEO) when Mozilla under-invested in desktop performance, failed to get Firefox OS off the ground, and most likely laid the groundwork to switching to Yahoo.

I was influencer only until 2013 when I took over engineering, so I’ll take some blame for desktop, especially from then till I left.

Mozilla bungled Firefox OS after I left, lost Andreas Gal and most of the top talent, lost Li Gong, while KaiOS based on same code and business plan, with some of the talent, took over and grew to over 200M phones. Blame Mozilla there.

I had nothing to do with the switch to Yahoo. That deal was a gleam in someone else’s eye and I left before it was done.

Last thing: how did not-me leadership do after I left, and I started Brave and grew it to 40M users while Firefox lost over 50M? You may dislike me, but your fantasy blame game cannot excuse Mozilla outcomes lately.

> Brendan Eich was CEO of Mozilla and they were flying high

flying high for all eleven of those days or just some of them? :P

> And Eich single-handedly created the only other viable browser in the market starting from scratch [market wise, not technology wise].

This is a bizarre re-writing of the history of Mozilla. Brendan Eich was obviously very important but he definitely wasn't alone, their corporate owner at the start was AOL, then a gigantic company, and he wasn't originally involved in Firefox when it started, it was a rebellious offshoot from the rest of Mozilla's large number of existing products, some dating back to the Netscape days.

I was involved with the mozilla/browser team from the start, we shared an irc channel and knew how to use it to take down Netscape inside AOL and then restart the browser market.

Who are you and where were you inside Netscape then? Or are you just lying about me?

I totally get you, as a long time Mozilla fan, I'm sad to see the direction towards which Firefox and Mozilla as a whole are going.

But it's not like Brave is ethically or technically better. They use Blink (the same engine as Chrome) and therefore contribute to the mono-culture of the web.[1]

They collect donations on behalf of content creators[2], they created this "Attention Token" based on etherium to replace ads with all the controversies surrounding cryptocurrencies (from the pyramid-scheme to the global-warming topic, I know the latter is not valid with Etherium anymore), …

I think that these days, it's more about choosing the lesser evil as a browser.

[1] https://archive.md/S7GZf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brave_(web_browse...

We do indeed use Chromium, though patched for security and privacy reasons (see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...). I don't see how that's an ethical or technical mark against us, however. Early on we did tests with Gecko, but soon found that if we were to build a compatible (with the Web as it is) browser, we'd need to do so with Chromium.

Your claim that Brave collected donations on behalf of others is quite misleading. There was a bit of confusing UI in our early tips interface (called 'Payments' at the time). We clearly marked verified creators as such, but gave no special marking for unverified creators (our approach resembled that of Twitter's blue checkmarks).

Regarding the "donations" themselves, we allowed Brave users to direct BAT from our user-growth pool (that is, Brave's own tokens) to creators. If those tokens were not claimed by the intended recipient after 1 year, they (Brave's tokens) would be recycled back into the system. As Wikipedia records, there were major UI/UX changes made about 48 hours later which dramatically improved the feature, IMHO.

The latter is still valid for Ethereum until the update to ETH v2 and Proof of Stake is live. We are not there yet.

When is this expected to go live? I thought we'd be there by now.

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.

Yeah, built-in adblockers (including the blocking being written in Rust and built into the browser, so it won't get nerfed by Manifest v3. Also capable of doing CNAME unmasking, the thing that makes uBO better on Firefox, btw) and other anti-tracking measures, running their own end to end encrypted sync architecture and standalone revenue streams like Brave Talk, their Brave Ads-driven takes on Search and News, etc. so they can be actually independent. Yeah. Just a cryptocurrency scam.

The coin itself is one of the few that has a value based on some actual use, at that:

Brave sells adspace, gets paid in Money™. They keep a cut, take the rest and buy BAT with it, give it to users. Users can then tip content creators with the BAT and get some compensation for Brave's part in killing tracking ads.

Many people are idiots who do think that BAT is for them to get rich but like hell it is. Single ad viewers aren't very valuable, they only matter in aggregate, so you'll only ever get pocket money as BAT.

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.

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/

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-disas...

How about the impact on critical infrastructure such as hospitals due to ransomware? 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.

>to the point where the thought has struck me more than once if the current CEO of Mozilla is in the pocket of Google

No need to wonder. Mozilla gets $450M per year from Google [0], and the Mozilla Chair gets a large chunk [1]:

[0]: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo...

[1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

I wonder what it would take to trigger an official investigation, because if they manage this Google has destroyed a values for many hundred million dollars and also solidified their position as a monopoly.

What Mozilla is doing now with Firefox should be taught in business schools as an example how to destroy a brand.

It really is strange and I don't understand what's driving all these bad decisions.

My guess is that they're unhappy of being a fringe browser with a "small" (a few millions) crowd of loyal users, but instead want to be "great again".

Can someone fill me in?

Hostility towards users asking questions as seen in the tabstrip API bug. (A really simple thing that I fix on a weekly basis in 4 minutes every time I restart Firefox but somehow next to impossible for Mozilla. Although I should admit they are making it harder and harder for me as well.)

Pushing Pocket (which is nice and could have become a nice source of income from users like me who wants to support the browser) in a dishonest way and as a built in part of Firefox instead of an extension that people could remove, saying there were no ties when there definitely was.

Almost scaring the crap out of a number of the more careful ones of us when they installed a "I, Robot extension" or something without any warning.

Milking the browser part of the system dry to fund its "mission", then laying off browser engineers and the Rust team to save money.

Pretending to be a community when fundraising, but a dictator when making decisions.

Misleading people to think they suppprt Firefox when they donate to the foundation, then sending nothing to the browser and burning it all on "its mission".

In the real world, Firefox is already dead and the only real competing browser engine is Webkit/Safari.

Firefox's market share is 3.6% and on mobile only 0.5%. On many websites, mobile traffic is now at about 70%. Firefox doesn't even show up in dashboards, and is smaller than various Chromium clones and/or regional browsers.

We've been here before (hell, 3% looked massive back then, and in a much smaller market). Marketshare is not an issue, the relationship with the community is. A strong community, united around a core of values and secure that the product is built with these values at heart, will evangelize such product out of a niche. Unfortunately, the current Mozilla leadership doesn't seem to understand that significant chunks of its community have lost the faith.

I want to agree, but can't.

The loss of market share has nothing to do with the browser in itself. Mozilla simply has no reach. Chrome is shipped via Android and on the desktop via services having a billion+ users, like Youtube and Gmail.

Mozilla has no reach or push. It's not an engineering problem.

The difference is that when Firefox initially appeared, Microsoft was treating Internet Explorer as a "finished product" and letting it go completely stagnant.

Google and Apple aren't making that same mistake, at least not to that same level. The developers are happy with the tooling, and the fact that ECMAScript and HTML API's keep evolving faster than much of the ecosystem can keep up with. The casual public is happy about a fresh coat of paint, or putting tabs in a different place every few years.

There just isn't the same opportunity due to incumbent vulnerability today.

while the relative decline is definitely bad mind you that is still ~200 million users. The internet's pretty huge. Not so dead you couldn't theoretically at least crawl back from.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

> I'm still holding out with Firefox

I have been using Firefox since the Pheonix/Firebird days where you download it and unzipped it to a folder.

I left a few months ago because I just couldn't get the performance where I needed it. I unfortunately had to go to yet-another-Chromium browser and just chose Brave because it seems like it has the right priorities. After installing the same extensions I was using on Firefox it's pretty much the same, it's just faster.

I hate saying that, after two decades of using Firefox. I want another browser engine. We need that competition.

We lost Microsoft. We still have Apple with Safari and I hope Mozilla can hold on with Firefox.

But if Google ever cuts that search funding I don't see a great future.

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.

Here is one example in Brave's favour, seach: politics influences the science of covid-19

Brave - first result.

Google - no first page, no second page, no third page, stopped checking.

Let's try that in quotes - it's the exact title of the article: "politics influences the science of covid-19"

Brave: first result

Google: no results found, searching without quotes.

Yeah, I've tried switching to other search engines a few times, but one domain where a lot of them really lack is non-English results.

Google has increasingly turned to garbage these past few years. But searching anything non-English on other search engines really feels like randomly populated results.

Location and temporal results are also lacking on non-Google results. Google also over-optimizes for them, so sometimes DDG is nice when Google is for some reason absolutely convinced I'm searching from some random town in another country and is only serving up results for that area.

I agree that the quality isn't comparable yet, but don't forget that this is barely out of beta and that google had decades to imprpve their product.

"Google" "private"; unbelievable someone can put these two words in same sentence. Google cannot even pull pages older than 10yrs old at the moment.

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.

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.

The smartness gets me, especially with the image search. It used to be pretty useful.

Now Google seems to really want me to see what its ML model thinks is in the image. No, when I upload a picture of an actor, I'm not trying to search for pictures of "adult" or "man". Or, my recent favorite that had three people in the image, a suggested search for "sharing".

I tried your example both with and without quotes and I got Apple Hospitality which seems to be correct.

Humans make so many typos that for the majority of people, autocorrecting is a net win.

I knew someone would try, which is why I specified this was just an example, I'm sure this time with that made up word it works, but when it doesn't it's pretty obvious and infuriating.

And autocorrect is a net loss if you can't correct the autocorrect.

I wish there was a mode for "do as I ask"

Why not use a real example instead of "Aple" (which returns what you expect: the stock for Apple Hospitality REIT)? Shouldn't be hard at all if this really is such a common problem.

I can't speak for others, but I move on in frustration. I don't meticulously document Google's myriad failures. Even if I dove into my search history to find one, odds are good you wouldn't have the same experience. And the divergence would increase with time and further training of the AI, to the point that even I wouldn't get the same result.

Every NLP AI is like that, it’s like trying to make a mentally challenged person do something for you and you have to correct them for something extremely simple and it is frustrating.

Yes, Google, I did not type North Korea DHL by accident. I really mean the odd one because I’m curious if they have DHL but I really don’t feel like explaining it to you. Could you please simply don’t assume stuff by default? I appreciate the “did you mean” suggestions but let’s not try to be too smart.

Google was great when it understood that North Korea and DPRK are the same thing but these days it’s like “North Korea DHL? You must be trying to send a package to Republic of Korea”. Maybe that’s because there’s not much ad revenue from helping out people to get information about DPRK.

I only get relevant results such as "Does DHL deliver to North Korea?" and "DHL establishes operation in North Korea". Do you have a better example actually illustrating this?

This time it returned relevant result for me too, I recall getting annoyed by it some time ago so maybe its not relevant example anymore.

Anyway, it happens all the time. Goole assumes that I mean something and I need to quote words trying to enforce my query. Pretty much every time when the returned results don't include the words I typed is a frustration for me. It makes it very hard to fix the query because I need to study every result instead of having no results or obviously low quality results.

It's especially hard when I'm not well versed in the subject, so I need to go through the results only to realize that these results are not about the thing I'm looking for.

BTW, I do less Googling these days. I would usually search Reddit, HN and StackOverflow directly from their websites as the search results would be from the expected domain and not too smart but just enough smart to correct typos etc. Also the filters work better.

Are they using AI for search? That would be a recipe for getting relevant search results only sometimes since AI is based on statistic models.

They're using AI for everything now.

So what did you find out? Does DHL deliver to DPRK?

Apparently they do deliver and they even have a branch in Pyongyang.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuMsDf-z_hs

And the AI was better this time, it returned DHL's page as the first result: https://mydhl.express.dhl/kp/en/contact-us.html

Definitely agree. My experience with Google lately is like this:

- I search for keywords A B C D - I get 4 irrelevant text ads - First result is relevant and contains all keywords - "Other related searches" - Then a list of results than omit A, B, C or D ("include A?"), or even omit multiple keywords, removing any sense in the query

And the whole time I feel like I'm being pushed around to buy something. It's becoming unbearable. I'm pretty sure Google is optimizing for more ad impressions at this point to burn through adsense credits asap...

This is interesting to me because I've been left with the opposite impression. I've tried several times to switch to an alternative such as Duckduckgo and _always_ end up supplementing it and eventually switching back to Google because the results just aren't what I'm after. It's fine when the answers I want exist on Stackoverflow for example, but anything more esoteric or less specific and I find myself disappointed. I'd love to switch permanently.

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) which shows Google results but without the tracking. I am happy with it, that I have completely ditched DuckDuckGo in favor of it.

There is also startpage.com, which gives you Google search results but with privacy. But my problem is finding relevant information.

Startpage is now owned by an advertising company [1]

[1] https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

This can be aggravating when you're looking up an error message or exception that follows the same format as other errors.

Error codes are even worse. If I'm looking for 1234, I do NOT want results for 1235 or 1233.

In trying to be smart, it becomes worse than retarded. I guess it could be called the "uncanny valley" of AI.

> returns what it thinks it should interest you, not what you've actually searched for.

It also returns what if thinks google will profit the most from - I’ve noticed a huge uptick in the number of ads which are poor-quality results and usually take both the top 4 and bottom 4 positions on the first page.

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 . 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.

Same here, I’m in Shenzhen using Shadowsocks VPNs and many of my faster exit IPs were being blocked in recent months. Other times there are 5xx errors and when it does work, it’s significantly slower than Google and even DDG, especially on lossy / jittery links.

I really hope they improve the service, I was enjoying it as my default for a while.

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.

That error looks really generic. It's actively trying to tell humans how to workaround the block, but seemingly without any contextual awareness. It's almost like it's from a "block automated traffic as a service" service. Now I'm curious if there any clues about the provider in the the HTML/CSS/JS of the block page.

A LOT of abuse come from datacenter IP ranges. Most sites find it easier to just blacklist them all.

It seems normal to me that they only want access from residential IP blocks.

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.

Google answers with a captcha occasionally, the 'suspiscious traffic from your network' one

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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".

May be tone down your paranoia bit, once I disabled brave rewards, which was offered as a part of installation without any dark pattern I never saw any shilling. Also what’s wrong with premium search? You expect free things which cost a lot of money, but you must not see Ads? And Tor themselves wouldn’t recommend any other browser. Tor feature in brave doesn’t seem to be intended for super serious, but a safer VPN like alternative instead of say Express or Nord. Even that is optional. You are never forced to use any of these features. I don’t understand the sentiment of everything must be free and open source, when your daily life is not. At least on Yc backed HN, I wish I see people supporting alternate business models. If it works for them good, else market speaks.

Problem is that "free" is our only option. I would love to pay for search engine that has more configuration options and no ads, I would love to pay for a modern browser (engine) without any tracking and no ads. Reality is that I cannot do that.

Reality is apart from few hundreds may be users, no one wants to pay for stuff. WhatsApp costed a very nominal amount, No body in India cared until it became entirely free. So much that they favoured it over Indian grown app Hike messenger , which was much better Ux wise. So you must find a batch of users who are willing to pay, and hire/pay a chromium dev to maintain your code base, or some similar business model. Where the devs don’t expect to become rich based on the project, an their only goal is to maintain a ungoogled chromium. Expecting a corp to do that is a wrong way to look into it.

The right to directly vote for a search engine with actual money is huge, as is the right to withdraw that vote. If Google went this route a few decades ago, their search product (and the Internet as a whole) would likely be in a much, much healthier place today

Also, Google would have much, much less money.

What ad-supported financing removes, along with other things, is friction. You open google.com for the first time, and you can instantly use it.

Also, Google started in 1998. I don't know whether you remember, but I do: paying for stuff over the internet was pretty hard by then. Paying across national borders was harder still. I wished to pay for several pieces of software by then, but it was hard even if I agreed to walk down to a bank.

Compared to that, selling ads and receiving money from businesses was incomparably easier, for everyone involved. Unlike billing search users, it was a viable business model.

That was back when shareware told you to mail a check. I think "people who forgot" is a smaller set than "people who never knew." It's easy to forget a lot of this forum is people well into adulthood who weren't even alive in the '90s, and people who didn't get online until after the boom of new things built on the discounted ruins of the .com crash.

I've been using Brave on Android for a couple of years now, and it's great!

It asked me once during initial setup if I wanted to use Brave Rewards (or whatever the crypto component is called), I said "no", and it's never bothered me with anything crypto related ever again.

Then use chromium, who's stopping you?

brave shilling is concerningly effective

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.

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.

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.

The only concerning thing here is the growing belief that one's consumer choices are their "identity", and alternate choices are an attack on that identity. Moreover, that alternative choices must be feigned in bad faith, part of a conspiracy, "fake news", etc.

What happened to you, Internet? Politics is one thing, but this is starting to bleed over into "liking Apple", or "hating Apple", or any similar camp one finds themselves in with a web browser or programming language or other piece of tech. "People who feel differently from me must be faking it as part of a plot." What the hell?

I'd love it if this wasn't political. If Brendan Eich wasn't running Brave, I'd probably trust the browser a whole lot more. Same as how if Apple stopped providing service to China and quit leveraging slave-labor, I'd probably trust their products a lot more too.

> Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled

You mean like this? https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

That's my choice for when I need a Chrome based browser and I recommend it. No bullshit, just Chrome.

There's automatic updates if you install it via homebrew/winget/[packagemanager of choice].

If i remember correctly, i read in their docs that the builds can be submitted by anyone. Not sure how secure that is…

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!)

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-...

+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.

Thank you for the feedback, Zestyping. If you wouldn't mind, can you tell me more about what makes the text hard to read? Is it the size, font-face, or color (or a combination of these)?

Pro tip: If you aren't happy with the search results offered in Brave Search, and would prefer Google instead, perform the same search but with !g added to the end

You can write an user script to replace fonts if you use something like Greasemonkey.

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

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.

on the contrary. for what it's worth, I think google search is finally open to disruption. the tech required to compete with them is finally commoditized enough that it's financially doable, plus, and most importantly, they've screwed up their search results so much now that google search is just not that good anymore.

I also think that they're "too" clever with their search to their detriment. We tend to think in terms of text search and are looking for results that match what we want. I'd prefer not to have a machine assume I actually intended something else. Just give me great text search where I can perform various inclusions/exclusions and you'll win the market

What makes Google a lot more useful than the alternatives is the vast amount of “widgets” they have.

For example when searching for a persons age, in shows up instantly in a large font on top. When searching for “champions league today”, you will get all soccer games for today neatly presented right inside of Google.

I haven’t seen another search engine that makes accessing this type of information this easy to access. And the sheer amount of widgets and engineering power behind them probably makes it harder to catch up to Google for the small players.

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.

Google search results are not very relevant and are poisoned with lots of spam.

Most technical aspects of searching were solved and are now common knowledge.

It amazes me why no one is trying to do a better engine. It doesn't have to do everything Google does, it just has to do text search.

Maybe it's hard to get money from search unless you also track users, store their data and sell ads?

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

There is a simple checkbox to turn those off. IIRC they even are opt in.

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…

they have turn off switch for this?

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

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

That's only really useful for anthropologists though.

Like what?

https://search.brave.com/

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

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.

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.

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?

duckduckgo is Bing with a new skin and privacy features. Brave Search is built on top of an independent index.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What wrong if they’re trying to find more money while providing privacy? Would you rather have a browser from rich monopoly like google? Or an alternative thats self sustainable with its own money?

Of course it does. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and companies have to make money. One of the best things about Brave is that it's aggressively trying to build independent revenue streams and a footprint on the net. A company with solid, diverse, independent sources of revenue is much better positioned to keep making independent decisions.

http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...

Despite all their posturing about privacy, DDG is the same as Google. Especially given their founder's history with selling user data.

duckduckgo is Bing with a new skin and privacy features. Brave Search is built on top of an independent index.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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'.

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...

"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+compa...

You have a typo in your query (acquires) but strangely even with the correction first three results are irrelevant.

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.

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

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.

"Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google (and other engines)?"

Yes, simply add !g to your search query.

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.

Brave is the last bastion of good open source commercial software.

I will try to support them as long as they aren’t bankrupt.

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.

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

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.

About the tracking part, you may like to check Whoogle Search - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search It's Google results without the tracking, and it can be self-hosted.

> 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).

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.

The crypto button is removable. Have a look through your settings.

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.

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) and the Web Discovery Project (https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project) for more on how we are working to improve Brave Search more efficiently.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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...

Joe is a magical thinker.

Big tech bots are going to downvote you for saying this

Chromium based browser with attitude annoy me

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

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/.

How good is it for non-English content?

> 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.

Hadn’t thought about the native ad blocking feature^^ it is indeed a bit contradictory.

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

How is this "news" so high up?

This isn't even technically interesting.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com