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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

i have been using brave search for a while now and i was surprised and am very satisfied with the search results. missing image and video search was a bit annoying mostly in that it linked to google and bing but not any other search engines. but i just remembered to switch to where i wanted to do image search instead. it sometimes meant that i had to go back to retype my search query, but i'd rather have a good text search than be bothered by that. in most cases i'd know ahead of time if i wanted images so it was easy to pick the right search engine.

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I'm a little surprised to hear other people having such good results.

Brave search was my default for quite a while, until a few weeks after they got rid of bing results. As soon as that happened, stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be there, and 90% of the time I'd follow up searches with !g or !ddg just to get something decent to show up. The index just felt severely lacking, or the relevancy was pretty far off base.

Would you say search has greatly improved over the past month or two?

I feel like it's improved steadily over time. I used to find it severely lacking for anything code-related, but that's improved, too.

It's not as good as Google was at its peak (and Google itself has degraded severely in quality, IMO), but it's good enough that I can generally find what I'm looking for with a minimum of effort.

I run maybe 1 in 40-50 searches with "!g" because Brave is insufficient, for context.

> stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be there

Exactly my experience. I hadn't connected it to them getting rid of Bing results, but it makes sense. I've had to use the bang redirects to other search engines a lot more too, to a level I haven't had to in more than a year.

Possibly, at least for my own experience. It's much less often that I rerun a search with !g. Brave Search's results are becoming more relevant to my own queries, and Google's becoming less so. Not to mention how ads like to masquerade as ordinary Google results; using Google is starting to feel less comfortable.

That seems to be the general case, other search engines. Especially Bing and those based on Bing are yield increasingly good results, while Google is just ads and spam.

I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations. I've been using Brave as a default for 1y+ and I still get consistently bad results compared to Google. The only reason it's remotely competitive is how much Google itself has declined in quality.

A recent example from my search history, "doors of stone release date". The author has announced a new novella releasing Nov. 2023, but not the actual book Doors of Stone. The google infobox gets this wrong, but the first result is correct. Brave accidentally gets it right that there's no release date for the book, but misses the novella announcement and all but one of the results are blogspam.

>I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations.

The difference might be that they (including myself) don't ask search engines for facts like "doors of stone release date". They'll search for "doors of stone", find personally reliable sources like Wikipedia, Fandom, Goodreads, browse them and decide on an answer. When sources fail to appear, they'll either refine the search (like "doors of stone rothfuss") or call it a failure and maybe try a different search engine.

This is one the reasons why Brave has been good for me so far. When a relevant Wikipedia article exists, it shows it, even if the title doesn't match. Whereas lately DDG and others don't. In fact, you can see this with "doors of stone". Brave shows "The Kingkiller Chronicle", DDG doesn't at all, Google has it low down in the results.

It also shows Reddit discussions without needing to explicitly filter for it. And I use ad block to remove the AI summariser that takes up half the screen, it's not what I want from a search engine.

Yea I do enjoy that new(ish) discussions section feature. Anecdotally have found those to return more relevant results than the old site:reddit.com in google

The brave results are usually relevant for me, but I find it struggles when I'm looking for something very specific. Their indexing of reddit seems to have a lot of gaps when compared with Google.

Overall Brave search has been good for me. I have been using it as the default on every PC / Browser I utilize.

I will say there are times when it just falls flat. Like I will search for a brand or specific thing , expecting to get to the home / login page for that brand, and it just flat out gives me weird results.

But when I put the !g in front of the query, the first result is always what I wanted.

On the other than, when doing more general searches, Brave is on par or better than google.

> I will say there are times when it just falls flat. Like I will search for a brand or specific thing , expecting to get to the home / login page for that brand, and it just flat out gives me weird results.

Conjecture: that might have to do with filtering SEO'd results. It is probably difficult to get rid of the pages that are meant to look a whole like the legit brand pages but not get rid the brand page itself.

The search results are pretty good, but I can't work with the layout. I really don't like that video results a so prominently displayed, I don't understand why results a split into multiple "boxes". It's way to messy.

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