Starting today, online users have a new independent option for search which gives them unmatched privacy. Whether they are already Brave browser users, looking to expand their online privacy protection with the all-in-one, integrated Brave Search in the Brave browser, or users of other browsers looking for the best-in-breed privacy-preserving search engine, they can all use the newly released Brave Search beta that puts users first, and fully in control of their online experience. Brave Search is built on top of a completely independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks.
Brave Search is available in beta release globally on all Brave browsers (desktop, Android, and iOS) as one of the search options alongside other search engines, and will become the default search in the Brave browser later this year. It is also available from any other browser at search.brave.com.
I’m going to give Brave an honest try, since I’ve been quite unhappy with DuckDuckGo lately, and Google’s search engine has been going down the drain for years now. Being in search engine limbo is not a fun place to be, so I’m genuinely hoping Brave Search can fill this void.
Here’s my detailed review of Brave Search:
https://libretechtips.gitlab.io/detailed-test-of-brave-search-beta/
I’ve been using Brave for months. The highest Brave rewards programs that I’ve earned so far is 7 Bats. Now it was two to three times already that I’ve earned 3.x Bats, and then it goes back to less than 1 Bat. I suspect that Brave was stealing this if not for the bug in their rewards program.
So I am quitting using Brave.
Y0u are using Brave because of the rewards it gives?
Any search index is now more than just a search index. In the beginning it was just an index with fairly blunt search quieries. Then hand crafted quality rating became a thing. This was replaced by ranking where a result was effectively a vote by other web sites. Search sites do not operate in isolation. There is a symbiotic relationship between a search site and the sites it indexes and the people who use it. Any new search site will need to replicate this. At the same time anti-trust is an issue so any new search site has to overcome accumulated in-built biases of the market towards and between Google’s search site. There’s going to be lots of ways the search engine market is being “gamed” and possibly some amount of collusion.
American big tech isn’t neutral. Its already had a massively negative impact on European democracy and Europes ability to stand on its own feet and investment patterns. The respopnse of China and Russia (ditto Poland and Hungary) is extreme and a form of self harm. That is not a path Europe needs to go down but to say America (and now sadly the UK) have Europe’s best interests at heart all the time isn’t true either.
Exactly, it’s called SEO. 😉 I despise the whole concept of SEO, because it is at odds with creating quality content. It just irks me to think that somebody who would normally be a competent writer with his/her own distinct style could be forced by the “SEO experts” to sprinkle in a specific number of “keywords” at strategic points throughout the article just to sway the search ranking of the article. Plus SEO is not a true science since Google doesn’t reveal its ranking methodologies, it’s just a bunch of accumulated knowledge from previous attempts at “gaming” the system as HollyB mentions. Then Google changes its algorithm, and it’s back to square one.
I also resent the fact that Google wields its influence to force website owners to make their page look and behave like it wants them to. Frankly, I don’t care whether Google wants my page to be “responsive” or “mobile friendly” or whether it thinks I should be using HTTPS on my informational website about Barbie dolls. And yet, endless numbers of webmasters have been forced to practically re-engineer their entire site just to make it conformant with Google’s demands in order to get a decent ranking. That’s *not* right.
Yes, the worst, imho is the recipe blogs. They can’t just give you the recipe, it needs to contain the hero’s journey, biography and stretched out prose. Their basic reasoning for writing terribly and making their content so unusable is that the search engines/advertisers require that length to make any money.
Can we just go back to gopher yet?
It’s not Google. SEO is emergent. Anyone who wants to rank will reverse engineer the algorithm no matter who owns it. Life has been doing SEO for billions of years since organisms evolved algorithms to select the best mate. Human class AI could emerge from a genetic SEO algorithm. Sci-fi thinks of AI as a super mind with deep evil or good philosophies. It is more likely to be a car salesperson on steroids. That is where all the effort is going. Maybe they called it Android for a reason ;-).
I didn’t see it mentioned, does anyone know the business model that Brave Search is using?
Also, I often see DuckDuckGo mentioned in stories like this but I almost never hear about Startpage. I know it’s just a wrapper for Google similar to how DuckDuckGo is a wrapper for Bing, but are there any other reasons against using it?
https://brave.com/search/
“Privacy-protected search ads”… I guess we can start with a clear & exact definition of what “privacy-protected” means to them. Then, a clear & exact definition of the exceptions of that protection and/or “use” of your data. But then what’s the point? Most people’s privacy isn’t even protected by law so why would anyone think any entity having a financial interest in identifying them would be willing to provide what the law doesn’t? People may like the idea of privacy but privacy is an illusion in today’s world, where government spying and corporate greed is at an all-time high and going higher every minute. I’m not suggesting giving up the fight for privacy, just that the fight has a predetermined outcome. People and privacy will lose. Keep fighting armed with that.
I use both Startpage and DDG, alternating when one doesn’t find results that I feel are relevant enough. Between the two, Startpage tends to give more meaningful results but often on the second page. I prefer DDG’s much simpler site design and minimalism though, especially when using a text-only browser.
The Brave browser itself is mired in a privacy-violating cryptocurrency pyramid scheme, I damn sure won’t trust their search engine.
Whenever I try another search engine the results are almost always so poor. I don’t want to have to search through pages and pages of crap results to find what I am looking for. Google the vast majority of the time has high quality results and a relevant page within the first page of results almost all of the time.
It’s good to see another privacy-conscious search engines. As a long-time DDG user who’s always been satisfied with the results, I’ve become pretty comfortable with its !bang semantics so I thought switching to Brave would be a pain.
But big surprise, it turns out Brave has adopted all the same bang shortcuts.