[HN Gopher] Brave Search replaces Google as default search engin...
___________________________________________________________________
Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave
browser
Author : skellertor
Score : 691 points
Date : 2021-10-20 03:56 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brave.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (brave.com)
| travisgriggs wrote:
| 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?
| m0zg wrote:
| 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.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| duckduckgo is Bing with a new skin and privacy features. Brave
| Search is built on top of an independent index.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Friendly reminder that ungoogled chromium exists
| https://chromium.woolyss.com/
| Krasnol wrote:
| How is this "news" so high up?
|
| This isn't even technically interesting.
| Proven wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| leodriesch wrote:
| Hadn't thought about the native ad blocking feature^^ it is
| indeed a bit contradictory.
| pythux wrote:
| Brave browser does not block first-party ads by default so it
| should not be contradictory. If a user decides to enable
| aggressive mode of Shield then fist-party ads are blocked as
| well.
| Proven wrote:
| Aggressive mode? What's that setting called? Because I
| don't see it in Brave on iPad.
|
| I hope it's not "block JS" because that would make the
| browser unusable.
|
| I tried BSE with ad blocking on and had to scroll down past
| the ads to see the first result. Plus it's not possible
| tell for sure when ads begin and end.
| surajs wrote:
| Chromium based browser with attitude annoy me
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 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.
| decrypt wrote:
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| There is also startpage.com, which gives you Google search
| results but with privacy. But my problem is finding relevant
| information.
| vincent_s wrote:
| Startpage is now owned by an advertising company [1]
|
| [1] https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-
| one-gro...
| Closi wrote:
| > 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.
| 1_player wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| cromwellian wrote:
| 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.
| 1_player wrote:
| 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.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| I wish there was a mode for "do as I ask"
| DeathArrow wrote:
| They have it. It is called verbatim search. Just that it
| doesn't do what it is supposed to.
| gremIin wrote:
| So they don't have it.
| toyg wrote:
| They should call it _sudo_. It would be an absolute hit.
| 1_player wrote:
| They had it. The fact it doesn't work anymore is probably
| because some big brains at Google strongly believe that
| their AI knows better. Such hubris is the reason why
| Google sucks today and it absolutely rocked 20 years ago.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > I wish there was a mode for "do as I ask"
|
| There is verbatim and back in the day this is also what
| doublequotes meant.
|
| Google has gotten away by blaming it on spam since back
| when matt_cutts was here, but I fail to see how spam _can
| possibly be_ the reason why neither doublequotes nor
| verbatim works (edit:) _unless spammers have found their
| way into Googles ranking algorithm to neuter all exact
| match operators_.
| [deleted]
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| 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".
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This can be aggravating when you're looking up an error message
| or exception that follows the same format as other errors.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| 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?
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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.
| meesles wrote:
| This seems somewhat natural, at least to me.
|
| Imagine you're talking to your friend, and you say the
| exact same thing you tell Google: "North Korea DHL".
| They're not going to have any idea what you're talking
| about (they can guess) - do you want to ship something
| there? Are you making a comment/observation? A business
| opportunity? Your friend would probably ask clarifying
| questions to narrow down what you're talking about, or
| you would be more specific upfront.
|
| Computers don't magically read your mind nor they know
| your intent. Adding quotes to search and other 'advanced'
| techniques are the equivalent of adding context to a
| conversation.
|
| Personally I have rarely experienced what you have, and
| when I do it's usually for specific international queries
| (like searching for a Belgian slang word from Google US)
| which isn't an issue if you use the correct
| locale/language for what you're searching for. Obviously
| it's not perfect, I'm just surprised by your anecdote in
| the absence of a real example.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's possible that my habits don't represent how the
| general population uses the search. I've read that many
| people are asking questions, not simply searching for
| keyword and as a result Google tries to optimize for
| that. But then again, when I ask questions it's also hit
| and miss for me.
|
| I also no longer get good navigation suggestion from
| Google Maps, maybe my constant frustration with Google
| lately is pushing me to be too dismissive about all of
| their products. Surely they do great things but I'm not
| as happy with Google as I used to be.
|
| I find that systems trying to predict my intent are
| unbearable when they fail, it just feels like trying to
| interact with a very stupid person.
| meesles wrote:
| I think you're right with both points - most technology
| isn't designed for tech-savvy people like you and me, AND
| technology that tries to predict human intent is doomed
| to fail.
|
| When you want build a 'smart' system in the absence of
| true AI (which does not exist), the only real solution is
| to build a product for the majority, or support
| configuration for everyone. The latter seems pretty tough
| for a search engine. That being said, the advanced search
| features are just that, an attempt to give the 5% the
| control they need to do what they want. Whether it works
| or not is another story.
|
| It doesn't really excuse that the product fails you as a
| user, but at least it's a reasonable explanation (IMO).
| As I wrote this, I started thinking about
| plumbers/electricians going to a hardware store or
| interacting with electric/plumbing products designed for
| the general population. I'm sure they feel similar
| frustrations!
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 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.
| gremIin wrote:
| They're using AI for everything now.
| ApolIllo wrote:
| So what did you find out? Does DHL deliver to DPRK?
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| lopis wrote:
| 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...
| diss wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| TheEnder8 wrote:
| This seems more like trying to capture money. If this was about
| privacy, they could have just gone with duckduckgo.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| duckduckgo is Bing with a new skin and privacy features. Brave
| Search is built on top of an independent index.
| soundnote wrote:
| 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...
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Despite all their posturing about privacy, DDG is the same as
| Google. Especially given their founder's history with selling
| user data.
| sholladay wrote:
| 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.
| trts wrote:
| The bang operators for ddg justify it as my default even
| knowing that it isn't very good for some queries. The habit
| of being able to reroute a search to the engine that will
| handle it most appropriately is a killer feature. Only
| drawback is that the redirect can take an extra few seconds
| sometimes.
|
| It's hard to imagine replacing it. If Brave search becomes
| excellent then I can just use the bang for it.
| Comkid wrote:
| Brave Search already has bangs, they imported them from
| DDG. I believe they've changed some of them though
| eloisius wrote:
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Brave has its own index
|
| Brave has Brendan Eich and that individual knows a thing or
| two about what matters in tech.
| anaganisk wrote:
| 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?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| "If you are not paying for a product, you are the actual
| product being sold."
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| halfeatenpie wrote:
| 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.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| 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'.
| des429 wrote:
| 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.
| soundnote wrote:
| 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(tm). 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?
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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...
| BrendanEich wrote:
| Here it seems you mean I personally get 30% of gross ad
| revenue (below you seemed to say I got 30% of all BAT; false
| also). No, the 30% goes to the company, commissions and costs
| come out of it, and I get nothing directly tied to it. I get
| a lower-six-figure salary. Smearing me on false information
| is a bad look. Doing it again would be lying. Knock it off.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Great, the browser that was supposed to take a stand
| against Google only managed to cave in to their exact
| monetization scheme. Somehow I'm not surprised by the fact
| that you have nothing better to do than respond to Hacker
| News comments.
| ricardolopes wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| soundnote wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The purpose of BAT is funding Brave development, which is why
| Brendan Eich personally claims 30% of the currency ever
| minted. It's a joke along the same lines as Tether or Bingus
| Token in the world of DeFi.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| A stupid pair of assertions, given etherscan.io exists and
| shows all flows from creation of BAT on. I don't have and
| have never had 30%, nor has Brave ever sold BAT to pay for
| development or anything else.
| bob229 wrote:
| Only a mad man uses any google product
| 0x49d1 wrote:
| 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.
| Matheus28 wrote:
| A LOT of abuse come from datacenter IP ranges. Most sites find
| it easier to just blacklist them all.
| knuthsat wrote:
| 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.
| vadfa wrote:
| It seems normal to me that they only want access from
| residential IP blocks.
| 0x49d1 wrote:
| 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.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Google answers with a captcha occasionally, the
| 'suspiscious traffic from your network' one
| infofarmer wrote:
| 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.
| exikyut wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| At least Brave has the courage to rid of Google as the default
| search engine, unlike Firefox.
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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".
| GordonS wrote:
| 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.
| 1_player wrote:
| Then use chromium, who's stopping you?
| input_sh wrote:
| > Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled
|
| You mean like this? https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
| chromium
| DavideNL wrote:
| If i remember correctly, i read in their docs that the builds
| can be submitted by anyone. Not sure how secure that is...
| sdfjkl wrote:
| 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].
| dmw_ng wrote:
| 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
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| zeronine wrote:
| brave shilling is concerningly effective
| fastball wrote:
| 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.
| AegirLeet wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| The browser is not just the engine and the "browser
| engine hegemony" is not what really matters.
|
| What matters is that Google does not establish a position
| where it can use its _browser_ to dictate the direction
| of the whole web in favor of its business.
|
| Chromium or not, Brave was never forced to adopt the
| changes in the extension manifest (which would block some
| ad-blocking and tracking mechanisms). They also never
| were forced to implement FLOC, they have their own policy
| regarding third-party cookies, etc, etc.
|
| Sure it would be better if we had diversity and more
| choices in all different layers, but if you think about
| it the more companies use Chromium to create browsers
| that take the web in a different direction from what
| Google wants, the more Google gets judo-ed out of its
| dominance.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I think we've seen how Google can kneecap it's open
| source products with Android, taking more and more
| portions into closed source. Why won't they take the same
| step with chromium if Microsoft edge and Brave become too
| popular?
| rglullis wrote:
| In your example, Chrome is to Android as Chromium is to
| AOSP. They can not close the Chromium parts, much like
| they can not close the AOSP parts.
|
| Having MS Edge and Brave becoming too popular would be
| akin to getting LineageOS, /e/OS to mainstream, and it is
| exactly my point: no matter how much that would be
| against Google's interests, there is nothing they can do
| about it.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Lineage and e are both at a disadvantage because of a
| lack of Google play integration which makes banking apps
| among others not function. People can hack around this
| but the OS will never end up mainstream as a result.
|
| To do the same to chromium, all Google would need to do
| is make YouTube rely on some proprietary DRM that's not
| in Chromium and everyone will end up switching back to
| chrome. Brave isn't large enough that Google cares to
| swat them away, but since they control the underlying
| project they have ways to neuter chromium.
| rglullis wrote:
| > People can hack around this but the OS will never end
| up mainstream as a result
|
| Not people. _Companies_.
|
| Microsoft and Brave are only piggy-backing on Google's
| resources and manpower. It's not like they can't they do
| it, it's more of a "why should we try to set sail now
| while there is a huge transatlantic ship that can carry
| us?".
|
| If Google starts neutering Chromium, it's on Microsoft,
| Brave and all other browsers depending on it will pick up
| the slack.
|
| And if they don't, _that 's_ when it makes sense to look
| for a Chromium-free alternative.
|
| If Mozilla's problems were financial or lack of capacity
| to get the resources to work on the browser, at least
| you'd have a point in saying "we need to support the
| alternatives now". But Mozilla's problems are not
| financial, they are due to bad leadership. No amount of
| money thrown their way is going to solve it.
|
| > Brave isn't large enough that Google cares
|
| Google asked Brave to testify in Congress in their favor,
| to say that Google is not abusing its dominance on the
| web. Google _can not_ swat them away.
| xNeil wrote:
| It seems Brave tones down or deals with most of the
| creepy stuff in Chromium. https://github.com/brave/brave-
| browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
| orangepurple wrote:
| On a technical level there is a Chromium without Google
|
| https://chromium.woolyss.com/
|
| I don't care for your political argument.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you don't care for political arguments, you probably
| shouldn't defend a browser made by Brendan Eich.
| tommit wrote:
| 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.
| Tepix wrote:
| I'm surprised by the hatred towards pretty much anything
| these days, even things that are benign.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| 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?
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| anaganisk wrote:
| 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.
| Tom4hawk wrote:
| 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.
| anaganisk wrote:
| 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.
| skinkestek wrote:
| 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.
| neiman wrote:
| What Mozilla is doing now with Firefox should be taught in
| business schools as an example how to destroy a brand.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| It really is strange and I don't understand what's driving
| all these bad decisions.
| neiman wrote:
| 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".
| schleck8 wrote:
| Can someone fill me in?
| skinkestek wrote:
| 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".
| mkl wrote:
| It was Mr. Robot, and it was installed via the user
| studies test system.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Milking the browser...to fund its "mission", then
| laying off browser engineers and the Rust team to save
| money...Misleading people to think they suppprt [_sic _]
| Firefox when they donate to the foundation, then sending
| nothing to the browser and burning it all on "its
| mission" _
|
| This is where they lost me as a donor. Mozilla can't go a
| month without launching a new idiot project.
|
| Do we know what fraction of their revenue gets spent on
| Firefox and Rust versus everything else?
| tristan957 wrote:
| Mozilla literally can't win on HN or Reddit. People
| criticize them for taking money from Google and then when
| they try to monetize new ideas, they again get criticism.
|
| The Mozilla Foundation (where your donations go) is not
| the one launching these new ideas that you hate so much.
| If you are going to hate something, at least hate the
| right thing.
| boppo1 wrote:
| What is "the mission"? Maybe it is important.
| blinding-streak wrote:
| Also spending years and millions of dollars on Firefox
| OS, a totally futile gesture.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I dunno. I've been really tempted to get a KaiOS phone
| lately (trying to get away from smartphone, but can't go
| full dumb-phone yet). I'd probably have sprung for it if
| I could find a Nokia 8110 4G, in black, that worked with
| US carriers other than AT&T.
| sam_goody wrote:
| 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.
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| I'd forgotten about Brendan Eich. Thanks for reminding me why
| I'll try hard to never install any software that benefits
| him, like Brave.
| andai wrote:
| You'll have to stop running JavaScript, too ;)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| tbf I don't think Eich benefits from JS usage
| BrendanEich wrote:
| I missed the tee-shirt franchise. https://comb.io/jZLfI2
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| magicalist wrote:
| > _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.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| 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?
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Or are you just lying about me?_
|
| Leaving aside the whole "please don't fulminate" thing,
| you're going to have to be specific about which part is
| incorrect. Is it just the "he wasn't originally involved
| in Firefox when it started" word choice and you'd like
| that amended to "he didn't start Firefox (though was
| aware of it and soon incorporated it into Mozilla's
| strategic plans)"?
|
| The righteous demand for truth would be a bit more
| inspiring if you'd similarly correct the GP for "lying"
| about you being the one true Mozillian, though.
|
| edit: also, rereading my original post, I'm sorry if the
| first line reads as mean spirited. The ":P" was meant for
| the poster's inconsistent recollection of events.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| I reject your false dilemma split across a parenthetical
| aside (which shows your prose skills :-P). No, it's not
| either "he didn't start Firefox (though was aware of it
| and soon incorporated it into Mozilla's strategic
| plans)". I was close with all the principals, we talked
| about doing it from the very start, we strategized on how
| to get it out under Netscape management radar.
|
| Ask Dave Hyatt, Blake Ross, Ian Hickson, or others if you
| dare. Unlike you (I have to presume), I have friends who
| support me and will testify if you bug them and they are
| willing to answer HN anon hostiles like you.
|
| I never said I was "the one true Mozillian", that's
| another false dichotomy from you, and a jerk move. You
| didn't answer my question about the basis for your hot
| take here. I doubt you were there at Netscape. Did you
| just make it up, or get it third hand?
| sf_rob wrote:
| >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.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| 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.
| sf_rob wrote:
| >You may dislike me
|
| I said nothing of the sort.
|
| >but your fantasy blame game
|
| I did not blame you, only addressed the narrow point of
| Mozilla "flying high" in 2014.
|
| >cannot excuse Mozilla outcomes lately
|
| I said nothing about Mozilla's recent history.
|
| I get that the tech community has not treated you nicely
| so I guess I understand reading things defensively, but
| that doesn't inspire good faith discussion.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| What a fake reply. First, you did blame me:
|
| "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."
|
| The last "most likely laid the groundwork"
| ungrammatically modifies the "Eich was still at Mozilla"
| and definitely tries to blame me for Firefox making Yahoo
| default search in Dec. 2014. Own up to the denotation of
| your own fractured words!
|
| Of course you didn't mention Mozilla's history after me,
| as you were too busy blaming me for problems up until I
| left.
|
| There is no "the tech community" and I'm not defensive,
| but you are, because I called out your offensive and
| dishonest comment. Have a nice day.
| sf_rob wrote:
| My original response was to someone who set the timeframe
| (2014), the person (you), and the claim (healthy
| Mozilla). I'm sorry for suggesting that you might be
| defensive rather than just disingenuous but thanks for
| putting it on full display.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| I'm not sorry for noticing that you are worried about
| being called a liar.
| cybernautique wrote:
| Any thoughts on rebasing Brave to Rust, or else picking
| up the now-defunct Servo project?
| WithinReason wrote:
| >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
| skinkestek wrote:
| 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.
| acatton wrote:
| 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...
| moystard wrote:
| The latter is still valid for Ethereum until the update to
| ETH v2 and Proof of Stake is live. We are not there yet.
| _han wrote:
| When is this expected to go live? I thought we'd be there
| by now.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| It's been "coming soon" for years. It's basically just a
| greenwashing tactic that never has to be delivered on.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| $5 billion+ is staked on ETH2 already. It's delivered, it
| just takes time to migrate the entire market cap.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| 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.
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| As I mentioned below, antitrust authorities are coming
| for Apple and Google. The opportunity will be there very,
| very soon; but you can't ride a wave without a surfboard,
| and at the moment it looks like Mozilla is more
| interested in selling product-placement stickers than
| building a great board.
| [deleted]
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| It's not like FF was ever shipped with Windows. It's just
| that enough people saw enough value and purpose in it, to
| go out and get it themselves.
|
| You can install FF on Android in a second on the Play
| Store, it's easier than it's ever been on the desktop;
| but you have to _want_ to install it in the first place.
| Some of this _want_ can be generated by feature
| excellence, some by peer pressure; but for a long time
| now, FF has lagged in producing the former and its
| leadership has actively sabotaged the community that can
| provide the latter.
|
| Obviously FF was helped by MS dropping the ball in a way
| Google has not (yet), but in my opinion what happened
| then could be done again. Antitrust action is coming for
| both Apple and Google, Mozilla should be ready to pounce
| right there and then - but it cannot happen if the
| leadership does not understand that there is a problem.
| fleddr wrote:
| Firefox came to power because there was a massive vacuum:
| the stagnant IE. Firefox simply was a fundamentally
| superior browser.
|
| This vacuum no longer exists. The competition isn't
| stagnant, they're speeding away.
| toyg wrote:
| People say that but for ages FF simply couldn't do what
| IE did. ActiveX was a thing and FF just didn't support
| it. Java applets broke all over, and CSS support was a
| minefield. _Most of the mainstream web was outright
| broken_ in MozSuite and FF. It wasn 't clear at all that
| FF was "superior" in any way - in fact, the build system
| was a nightmare, you couldn't embed it anywhere, you had
| to fix proxy settings all the time (because it had its
| internal stuff, not using the Windows settings)... Yeah
| it had extensions, but a lot of people didn't even know
| what those were (and making them wasn't particularly easy
| - easier than dealing with MSVC++, but still not easy).
| Still, people were _invested_ in the success of FF; they
| tolerated the brokenness and pestered the hell out of
| website owners to fix their shit and evangelized the
| browser to friends and family. Because people _cared_
| about FF and what it represented: an open browser to use
| the open web, built for people and geeks - not
| "consumers" or "enterprise customers".
|
| Now people don't _care_ , because Mozilla is seen as Just
| Another Silicon Valley Corp, with overpaid execs doing
| shady deals to push shit down our throat. At that point,
| "they are all the same" so might as well use the browser
| that works more often (Chrome). This can change, but it
| needs a positive shock.
| hvis wrote:
| > It's just that enough people saw enough value and
| purpose in it, to go out and get it themselves.
|
| This happened at the time when no other browser vendor
| drove any kind of serious marketing campaign. Even so,
| Firefox only reached 30% market share at its peak.
|
| Then Chrome shot out, backed by Google's marketing
| budget, bundled with popular software installers and
| featured at the "Internet home page": "Still running
| Firefox? Upgrade to Chrome now!" (quote is approximate,
| but very close)
| whoopdedo wrote:
| > It's not like FF was ever shipped with Windows.
|
| At one time Lenovo was bundling Firefox on their
| computers.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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
| NoGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| 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.
| skyfaller wrote:
| 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.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Give it a rest. Everything you stated is hyperbole.
|
| We should all just return to sticks and stones I guess.
| soundnote wrote:
| 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(tm). 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.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > 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.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| 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.
| jozzy-james wrote:
| ah yes, the coronavirus...the thing that made everybody not
| use the internet
| zionic wrote:
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| 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.
| soundnote wrote:
| 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.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Why is Mozilla Foundation doing political activism?
|
| At least partly because people like me pay them to. I
| like the work the Moz foundation does and I'm happy to
| contribute to it with donations.
| e-v wrote:
| I am not sure I want to know about your political
| opinions if you consider Mitchell as being "far-left"
| (not that I'm a great fan of hers). That is certainly not
| what the far left is, neither historically nor in the
| contemporary world.
| gordian-mind wrote:
| Sadly, it's out of (misguided) convictions...
| bodge5000 wrote:
| "...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.
| Whitespace wrote:
| 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.
| soundnote wrote:
| It's ironic that they had one and ousted him.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| ohhh that makes a lot more sense actually, cheers
| Graffur wrote:
| Based on this I will start using Brave.. at least it's the
| devil you know
| wolpoli wrote:
| 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?
| eloisius wrote:
| 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).
| p-e-w wrote:
| 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.
| underwater wrote:
| What about people who keep snakes as pets?
| p-e-w wrote:
| Their queries (such as "best food for reticulated python")
| are unlikely to have results from "python.org", so such
| rules would not affect them.
| efskap wrote:
| There's room for ambiguity. python egg, python length,
| python container, python types, python size, python
| lifespan
| dash2 wrote:
| "For security, it is best to manage Python within its own
| dedicated container. Live Python in an unmanaged
| environment is unwise and can lead to resource
| strangulation. When objects are consumed by Python, this
| will affect their lifespan."
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > Can you imagine a student searching for how to use a
| Python feature, but found a PEP illustrating the design of
| that language feature?
|
| That wouldn't be so bad. PEPs contain a short summary,
| motivation, and usage examples.
|
| That said, I do get your point.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| 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.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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.
| freediver wrote:
| >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
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| freediver wrote:
| What we do (at Kagi Search) to address this problem is use
| our own index which contains only non-commercial results
| from the web as well as forum discussions. Thinking behind
| is that the quality of the content is in inverse proportion
| to the number of ads/trackers/affiliate links on the site.
|
| Our index is still in infancy but the example of it working
| for the query 'best laptop' can be seen in this screenshot:
|
| https://imgur.com/ypyOilV
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Thinking behind is that the quality of the content is
| in inverse proportion to the number of
| ads/trackers/affiliate links on the site.
|
| search.marginalia.nu does this and for the stuff that it
| can find it works wonderfully.
|
| Getting results on search.marginalia.nu is (borderline)
| delightful in the best cases. Last month I searched for
| something along the lines of "dual boot windows linux"
| and got 3 fantastic results among the top ten - and no
| blogspam.
|
| If SEO specialists figure out and start to reduce ads,
| trackers and scripts generally I'll count that as a win
| too :-)
| dantyti wrote:
| afaik, seo spammers are quite sophisticated in masking
| affiliate links and tracking codes with redirect chains
| and other techniques. Their general assumption is that
| google does exactly what you expect to do and downranks
| affiliate spam.
|
| What are your thoughts on reputable news websites that
| have tons of ads and trackers because they have yet to
| figure out any other viable way to survive?
| freediver wrote:
| I think that 'reputable' and 'tons of ads and trackers'
| do not belong in the same sentence.
|
| Ad-supported business models incentivize the creation of
| large quantities of content, because you need a lot of
| pageviews to earn a little bit of money with ads (since
| most people either ignore or block ads, if they manage to
| load the page to see them at all).
|
| High quality journalism should have value that we are
| ready to pay for, like we did for hundreds of years. This
| concept is called the "newspaper".
|
| You are expected to pay for high quality baker or a
| tailor, book, movie or music, why not for getting
| information that "only" has the power to shape societies?
| If I see information next to an ad, I personally tend not
| take it too seriously.
|
| What is missing right now from a technology standpoint is
| an easy way to manage subscriptions, built into my
| browser as default. Expecting the user to create and
| manage a separate account/billing identity for every
| publisher is what is preventing this model to take off
| (IMO).
| lanterk wrote:
| And people already complain about paywalls. And even make
| tools to skip past the paywalls.
| SllX wrote:
| Sure it would help. Adblockers have had custom filter lists
| for years. If all you need to do is upload a text file
| every once in a while, that would go a long way to
| improving search results in general.
| hbn wrote:
| I didn't click into the paper, but I see now it also
| mentions crowdsourced filters. That would be much more
| effective than everyone creating their own blocklists
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| handrous wrote:
| Google clearly gave up on fighting spam some time around '08
| or '09.
|
| I think they realized it's expensive, and not actually good
| for business if the spammy stuff is using your own ads and/or
| analytics anyway.
|
| This is why almost all of the web looks like a shady spam-
| site if you don't have Adblock enabled. Google doesn't give a
| shit anymore.
| tyingq wrote:
| >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.
| [deleted]
| tommica wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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".
| prirai wrote:
| 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.
| tommica wrote:
| Interesting, I did not know it could do that - need to take
| a look into it!
| BarryMilo wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's also why every social network moved to an algorithmic
| feed. Had it remained chronological, our primitive brains
| would have noticed content from yesterday come up after a
| certain point, signaling to us that we are caught up and
| don't need to scroll further.
|
| Can't imagine how catastrophic that would be to their ad
| business.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| G*d forbid anyone ever stop scrolling. I was browsing
| airbnb the other day, looking at places in a small area
| (maybe 25 rentals) and was shocked/alarmed/saddened to
| discover that the app has infinite scrolling. Rather than
| the list ending once I've seen all 25 results, they just
| show them again in a different order.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Not to mention the fact they police content. They'll refuse
| to associate with anyone they deem objectionable enough for
| any reason. This will deny sites their revenue and will
| lead to self-censorship to regain their favor. Nothing
| kills perfectly good websites faster than some offended
| person complaining and ads getting pulled.
| [deleted]
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| If you control what articles and pages show up based on
| some searches you can impact elections. Forget ads, who
| would give up control every close election on the planet?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yeah. The dependency to adds, are a big reason why so much
| tech suck so much, despite trillions invested.
|
| Because those investments are not made, to show you clearly
| what you want to see, but to show you just enough, to not
| loose you while injection as much information garbage as
| possible. If we do not fix that, it will all just get
| worse, not better.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| https://felvin.com/ is trying to build "Search profiles", but
| it's still quite early.
| tommica wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, gotta look into this!
| RileyJames wrote:
| 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
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| 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.
| lobocinza wrote:
| There's a Chromium extension, uBlacklist, that does something
| similar. You can blacklist sites from search results and also
| whitelist so those are highlighted.
| potamic wrote:
| Excellent! I was looking for precisely this. Next, I would
| also very much like to weed out image/video/map
| suggestions, related searches, people also ask and page
| snippets. The cognitive overload from navigating these
| giant banners and getting to my search results is getting
| worse by the day.
|
| But, how stable is this? I tried so hard doing this with
| greasemonkey. But google's DOM is ridiculously obfuscated
| and kept breaking frequently. So much for the semantic web,
| heh?
| tapland wrote:
| https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist It's on Firefox as
| well as Chrome, and apple stuff.
|
| It's like a gift from god that allows me to block
| pinterest image results. Not had any issues with it what
| so ever.
| tommica wrote:
| Need to try this out!
| kodah wrote:
| I use Neeva.com and I think one of their features resembles
| this idea. It is a paid for search engine though.
| matwood wrote:
| I think neeva is interesting. Once payment and a login is
| required it changes the incentives and opens up new feature
| possibilities. One cool feature is linking your private
| cloud document storage making search very personal.
|
| It remains to be seen if they can get enough people to pay
| in order to keep going though.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| If they can search your private docs, they can see your
| private docs.
| tommica wrote:
| Hmm, a paid search engine - wonder how they handle the spam
| SEO problem, but is an interesting idea
| kodah wrote:
| I'm not sure how they actually do it, but it works pretty
| well. When I search for things I almost always find what
| I'm looking for. I use it both for tech and for personal
| stuff.
| smallerfish wrote:
| They won't let me try it because they "haven't launched in
| my region". Presumably that's because I'm in latin america,
| and they're conflating location and language.
| barkerja wrote:
| Neeva has been pretty good in my experience, but the lack
| of ability to make it the default search engine in Safari
| (macOS and iOS) is what prevents me from using it 100%.
|
| That's obviously not at all a knock against Neeva. Safari
| needs to allow more flexibility in its search engine
| defaults. I've filed multiple radars/requests to Apple to
| make this setting more flexible and/or provide Neeva as an
| option.
| thejosh wrote:
| The spam google has for this is outrageous.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| (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
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Reddit is effectively used as a covert propaganda and
| advertising machine so its absolutely not in their interests
| to provide that functionality sadly.
| AJRF wrote:
| 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.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Interesting. I find reddit results are some of the most
| useful results but maybe that's just related to my specific
| hobbies/searches.
| sverhagen wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| You don't have to use W3Schools (I prefer MDN myself) but you
| can forgive them. They've gotten better over time:
| https://www.w3fools.com/
| skinkestek wrote:
| Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant.
|
| I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it
| personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here?
|
| The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years
| is because for a large segment of users it works.
|
| And as someone else has pointed out the official
| documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online
| docs are close to worthless if you have a decent ide that
| shows you method signatures.
|
| PHP docs used to be a lot better in that they described what
| was going on and why and had comment sections that I imagine
| they also used as feedback to improve the docs.
|
| I haven't used PHP or Python for years but today there is
| Spring docs to drive me mad: telling me all the things I know
| and not telling me anything about how to interpret a Spring
| project.
|
| Spring is infinitely flexible and there are more ways to
| configure Spring than there are Spring programmers since most
| of them can't even configure two projects the same way ;-)
| xapata wrote:
| I can't speak for Java's docs, but Python's have good
| examples in the documentation that are not present in an
| IDE's tooltips. Further, there's often a handy link to the
| source code of the module.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Thinking back, yes it is probably true what you write
| about Python docs, the problem is you easily end up in
| the wrong docs when searching for something.
| xapata wrote:
| I'm not sure why that's happening to you. Perhaps you're
| being misled by some SEO to click on pages that are sites
| trying to put advertisements in front of you?
| skinkestek wrote:
| Not the same but I admit my explanation might not be the
| best.
|
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927092 for a
| more descriptive example.
| 1_player wrote:
| Of all the spammy sites, w3schools is the least of my
| problems. I still find a use out of it when I need some
| very superficial information about, say, an HTML tag.
| [deleted]
| sverhagen wrote:
| My hate for W3Schools comes from the low quality of the
| content and the impression I get that their high ranking is
| only the result of SEO hacking. I respect the fact that
| there's a lot of _poor_ official documentation. But let's
| not supplant that with different _poor_ documentation.
| Kiro wrote:
| The content is not low quality. It used to be pretty bad
| like 10 years ago but no more. I prefer W3Schools to MDN.
| glenneroo wrote:
| I find W3Schools fine for most use cases. What would you
| suggest as being a better resource?
| KronisLV wrote:
| Not in regards to W3Schools, but in regards to docs in
| general: i've found those of PHP to be excellent for one
| simple reason (regardless of what i think of the language).
|
| They have user comments, which oftentimes contain the
| information and examples that are actually very important
| in day to day usage, as opposed to a cut and dry
| description by the language authors.
|
| For example, go to this page and scroll down to "User
| Contributed Notes":
| https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php
|
| To me, it feels like most of the technologies out there
| could benefit from user source and user voted content at
| the bottom of pages like this, the one thing that IDEs also
| don't provide (though if one were to throw in some fuzzy
| search from, say, StackOverflow, we could probably get
| context surrounding a particular bit of code).
| ROARosen wrote:
| Just add the following in your Google search box:
| -w3schools.com
| sverhagen wrote:
| I meant doing so without adding it to every search. But,
| hey, I clearly didn't have enough faith in humanity... not
| only am I now able to find some extensions to generally
| mess with my search queries, there's extensions freakin'
| DEDICATED to filtering out W3Schools!!!
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/search/?q=w3schools
|
| (Edit: that doesn't mean I necessarily trust or recommend
| niche extensions like these.)
| 1_player wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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)
| seanhunter wrote:
| I have heard a few people say things like this, but I have
| been using ddg for years and I think I could count the
| number of times I got nothing back on the fingers of one
| hand, and those were times I was using incredibly specific
| search terms +"leprachaun eating marrow" +gif -funny or
| whatever (haven't tried that exact search but you get the
| idea).
|
| Occasionally I try google search to check and I virtually
| never think google's results were better. But I'm guessing
| a lot of that is down to how you do search-fu, what you're
| actually looking for and subjective stuff about ranking
| quality.
| MrPatan wrote:
| Come on, "dates in Cambodia"? How do you search for local
| trendy music, "Hot singles in my area"?
| ldng wrote:
| Isn't that a bit by force of habit ? I used to fallback to
| the !g quite often. I hardly needed it in the last 2 or 3
| years. And Google was consistently worse when I did. So, as
| you say, just my experience.
| rankun wrote:
| I hear this criticism a lot and I always wonder whether
| that has something to do with either me not having a Google
| account and thus using the unpersonalized search, or simply
| with what I search for, but Google is almost always giving
| me worse results that DDG or, for that matter, any of the
| smaller competitors.
|
| Google seems to be filled with sponsored results that are
| only superficially relevant, and from page 2 onwards, it
| sometimes feels like whatever it's giving me isn't related
| to my search at all. Even when I'm very specific with my
| query, using +/- and quoted phrases.
| arp242 wrote:
| I'm never logged in to Google, and don't even store
| cookies by default (although that may or may not be
| enough to prevent all tracking/personalisation, it's more
| than "the average" user and does seem to keep the worst
| out, not that personalisation is _necessarily_ bad; the
| singular reason I have an account is because I actually
| like YouTube personalisation - without it I just get
| idiotic nonsense on the frontpage and now I get stuff I
| actually want to watch, although the old YouTube model of
| good categories was still better, but ah well).
|
| I wish I had taken some screenshots, here's the only
| recent one I have: https://i.imgur.com/b9hu2a9.png - I
| was trying to find about Cambodian date writing
| conventions for some i18n code, but all DDG gave me was
| spam (and most likely, scam) results. Probably not the
| best search term in the first place ("Cambodian calender"
| would be better), but it's a decent example.
|
| I should keep a spreadsheet or something, but I'm too
| lazy for that. And it's not really all that interesting
| either.
| moehm wrote:
| I'm not sure if I did it right, but I searched for
| "Cambodian date writing conventions" and got this as
| first result.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
| arp242 wrote:
| Yes, my search terms weren't the best, and I did find
| what I wanted soon afterwards. However, just the
| inclusion of "dates" shouldn't bring up loads of spam
| (and most likely scam) sites.
|
| (What I actually wanted to know is how widespread usage
| of the Khmer calendar is, and if I could get away with
| just supporting Gregorian).
| yissp wrote:
| Meanwhile I was trying to find a romantic partner in
| Cambodia and Google kept giving me useless calendar-
| related results.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Same for me... I think maybe part of it is that people
| have forgotten (or never knew) how to choose good search
| terms, and Google has worked hard on giving good-for-
| most-people or good-for-your-profile-bubble search
| results for terribly-constructed search terms, while the
| others haven't. I've long had the habit of constructing
| search terms that are minimal but distinct, since I had
| to do a lot of searching on less-DWIM systems like
| library catalogs and journal indices dating back to the
| 90s, and this seems to serve me well with searching DDG.
| I expect Google simply doesn't care about your actual
| search terms very much, and gives you stuff matching some
| kind of linguistic model of your search; what it thinks
| you want to search for, rather than what you ask for.
| That would account for it giving worse results on a well-
| constructed query.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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...
| nr2x wrote:
| Yeah, DDG is just privacy Chrome on top of bing. As far as
| I can tell they've made no efforts at building a proper
| scraper or index. If Microsoft gets tired of the deal there
| is no more DDG. Risky proposition.
| kriro wrote:
| It's also horrible for non English content from my
| experience.
| jb1991 wrote:
| 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.
| ldng wrote:
| 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.
| katsura wrote:
| 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.
| tagawa wrote:
| It's actually possible to switch off ads in the DuckDuckGo
| search settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
| soco wrote:
| 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...
| jb1991 wrote:
| I've learned just cut out the entire exploratory first
| couple of steps and just always use !g when searching for
| anything developer related.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| occamrazor wrote:
| 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.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| soco wrote:
| I can imagine it was also a handy tool to DoS a site.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| That's a good point. I guess bad actors (exactly the same
| ones that publish those shit-sites) can abuse it to block
| the _actual_ sites.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Not a problem as long as it only affects the user
| themself?
|
| My guess is some ux head exploded when they realized
| someone might blacklist a site they wanted. Or maybe the
| one who made it got promoted and no one stepped up to
| maintain it?
| vurpo wrote:
| It was a tool to remove a site from _your own_ results. If
| you searched and saw a site you didn 't like, you could
| click to no longer get the results from that site. It
| wouldn't affect what anyone else saw anywhere.
| topbanana wrote:
| Commercial pressure seems the most likely to me
| p-e-w wrote:
| How would such "pressure" look in practice? Seems to me
| that every industry on the planet is at Google's mercy, not
| the other way round.
| seqastian wrote:
| How many google ads are on github or stack overflow
| compared to the other pages you find? They know exactly
| what every little change to the algorithm does to their
| bottom line.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Search doesn't have to concern itself with AdSense ads,
| search ads still make up something like %85 of Alphabet's
| total revenue
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| The worst sites a.k.a. those a user might want to block
| are probably also bringing Google disproportionally large
| amount of income is my guess.
| geenew wrote:
| Adding a minus sign in front of a site: specifier still works
| for me (eg "google -site:google.com"). Works on DDG, too.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| 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.
| schmorptron wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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
| stOneskull wrote:
| my answer was to rank sites higher the less ads they have
| Abimelex wrote:
| > Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads,
| republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc.
|
| I have the same feeling, but using Google ;)
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| > 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| They sure want to improve their own user experience. The "use
| your information to make tons of money" experience.
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| 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.
| skymt wrote:
| You're probably thinking of "Personal Blocklist", an
| official Chrome extension developed by Google. It's no
| longer available.
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/18/blacklist-google-search-
| re...
| rightbyte wrote:
| That actually sounds awesome. But the user in control? No
| wonder Google killed it ...
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| That's the one! Thank you.
| amelius wrote:
| Someone should inform https://killedbygoogle.com/ to
| update their site.
| generallee5686 wrote:
| Yes! I swear I remember banning some of those spam domains
| in 2010 or so. IIRC, I thought it was part of Google
| search.
| stelonix wrote:
| It definitely was. Sadly it was short-lived, it lasted
| maybe a year. I remember banning experts-exchange and
| being a lot happier.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| pinterest. Bane of all image searches.
| hairofadog wrote:
| yelp, pinterest, w3schools
| nr2x wrote:
| Prior to mdn w3schools was a decent way to quickly find
| info on random HTML tags. Not sure why it gets so much
| hate.
| hairofadog wrote:
| For me the issue with all of these sites is that their
| primary innovation seems to be dominating search results,
| and everything else is an afterthought. I actually don't
| know very much about w3schools other than that I have to
| continually reach over them to get what I'm after.
|
| I also seem to remember reading a lot of critiques like
| this one: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/280484
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Prior to the popularity of MDN and campaigns like W3Fools
| ( _q.v._ ), the articles on W3Schools were _very_ bad
| from a web standards perspective ( <marquee> and VBScript
| levels of bad); from a programming perspective, their PHP
| articles (which largely date from that time) are still
| incredibly shoddy. Their unwillingness to relinquish the
| unwarranted authoritative tone or at least visibly
| disavow any connection to the W3C (who asked repeatedly),
| coupled with their domination of search results, at a
| time of a standards push (remember validator buttons?)
| and multiple high-quality documentation efforts (later
| folded into MDN; Opera in particular had a good course)
| just plain got on people's nerves.
|
| They're a valid reference, just a low-grade one, and
| using a low-grade _reference_ is rarely a good tradeoff.
| They also used to be worse and never quite shook of their
| reputation.
| true_religion wrote:
| w3schools has its place but it's usually the top result
| when I'm never looking for it.
|
| Once it was useful. But now I memorized all the
| information there so it's not interesting.
| handrous wrote:
| All the various gif sites that make it nearly impossible
| to get an actual gif. Why the fuck are they showing up on
| _image_ results if the thing they serve to actual humans
| is a _video_? I thought tricking the Google Bot was
| supposed to be bad for SEO, but I guess not.
| Im_your_dada wrote:
| pinterest the most useless website in the search results
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I use the uBlackList addon in Firefox to block Pinterest
| results from Google search results with the following
| regular expression: /pinterest\..*/
|
| It also appends "block this site" links to all search
| results.
| jader201 wrote:
| It's a bit ridiculous, really. I actually don't feel the
| need to ban that many sites. I would probably be happy if I
| could just ban them. How can one site be so bad?
| johnebgd wrote:
| I'd like a ban lis option with public ban lists that I
| can elect to use so I can avoid having to spend time
| doing this manually.
|
| Think of it as server side uBlock for search results.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I don't actually want Google to index as much of the
| internet as it possibly can. I actually want streamlined
| indices that are tailored towards thoroughly searching a
| specific knowledge domain.
|
| Edit: I would love, love, love a search engine
| specifically tailored towards programming questions. One
| that doesn't treat queries like "C# ?." as me looking for
| "C#" and getting the most generic results possible.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, instead of Google collecting information about me to
| improve my search experience, I want:
|
| - A box where I can select the context of my search.
|
| - The box then appends a specific string to the query.
|
| For example, if I set the box to "clothes", the box will
| append "waist 34 inch, 5 feet tall" to the query.
|
| If I set the box to "programming", the box will append
| "favorite_languages:Python,C++" to the query.
|
| And of course a search engine should interpret it
| accordingly. No need to collect and store my personal
| information.
| godshatter wrote:
| I just want a search engine that gives me AND, OR, and
| NOT qualifiers or something similar. Parens, too, if
| possible. Ideally, an sql interface, but that's probably
| pushing it :)
| amelius wrote:
| You can have that with my idea. Just leave the Combobox
| empty.
| dhosek wrote:
| I had an idea for this where I was building a manually-
| constructed index of sites kind of like old-school Yahoo
| (related to typography), and then there would be a full-
| text search of those URLs and their close relatives
| (pretty much, the idea being that for a given URL, I'd
| index anything else in the same URL directory or
| subdirectories of that URL). I ended up giving up on it
| largely because time is finite and I have plenty of other
| projects competing for my time. I imagine something that
| built on the basic idea though could work, by omitting
| the Yahoo-style directory and instead working from a
| collection of vetted URL starting points.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Also Tenor. They've taken over just about all animated GIF
| results, then take steps to make it as annoying as possible
| to simply download the GIF.
| melony wrote:
| Tenor is owned by Google.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I had no idea. That explains a lot
| damiencarol wrote:
| At least move it in the "Image" tab; (facepalm)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| seriously, any Googlers around that are close enough to
| search to know why Pinterest is still dominating image
| results despite being incredibly low quality? this is a
| widely known problem.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| We have had a few posts about this, a blog from an ex-
| employee explained it basically as Pintrest spending tens
| of millions to do everthing they can to game Google
| search results and they arn't going to stop any time
| soon. Pinterest just puts A LOT of time and money into
| SEO.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I guess that makes sense... but it seems like they should
| be manually penalized. They're single-handedly degrading
| the quality of the entire image search product.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| Goggles is coming. https://brave.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf
| suddenexample wrote:
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| I guess I'm surprised that it's not possible to quickly
| deindex these spam farms and render their SEO spend a waste.
| Especially Google, I'm surprised they can't detect and ban
| SEO rings more effectively.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google did it with a lot of health blog spam that had low
| quality and false info but a ton of referral links. It
| takes a lot of bad publicity for them to act, though.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The SEO places aren't dumb, they do their best to mimic
| legit content.
| thestepafter wrote:
| I am surprised by this as well since Google is able to
| identify the origin of content (eg. Stackoverflow) and
| penalize sites for duplicating that content (or so they
| say). In my opinion it wouldn't be difficult to identify
| the domains duplicating the content and penalize heavily.
| But, those sites are most likely displaying Google Ads
| so...
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I just wish I could configure google to not show certain
| domains such as W3schools without adding a complex search
| query or installing plugins
| triceratops wrote:
| The W3schools hate is a bit outdated. Even W3Fools[1]
| eventually backtracked and acknowledged that W3Schools
| has continuously improved and updated their content.
|
| 1. https://www.w3fools.com/
| bsder wrote:
| This is _such_ an easy optimization that Google has to
| have tried it and seen their ad revenue fall.
|
| "Permanently remove this site from search results" seems
| like the absolute easiest "personalization" to implement.
| mynameismon wrote:
| And the most certain too. You don't need to guess whether
| or not the user really needs that result
| dx034 wrote:
| To be fair, w3schools and the like don't just copy
| content. They provide different information and, most
| importantly, present it differently from official docs.
| And for many, their way of presenting information may
| work better.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I acknowledge your opinion but still do not want to see
| that and several other spam sites over more official
| sources such as mdn.
| Closi wrote:
| I would assume this is easier if you are indexing more
| frequently and have been indexing for longer, and Google
| has more resources to allow them to crawl more often
| (another advantage to scale in search, which combined
| with other advantages of scale, is why Google has an
| effective monopoly IMO).
|
| If you recently started crawling you won't be able to
| detect which content was 'first', and if you don't crawl
| as frequently as google you are reliant on your crawl
| frequency being quicker than the 'content stealing'
| speed.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| > if you don't crawl as frequently as google you are
| reliant on your crawl frequency being quicker than the
| 'content stealing' speed.
|
| No problem there. If a page hasn't been crawled, it won't
| be a search result.
| Closi wrote:
| I mean you need to crawl often enough that you can
| determine which site stole content.
|
| If a full crawl of the web takes 3 months and A steals
| content from B after 2 weeks, it may not be possible to
| easily infer that A has stolen from B rather than visa-
| versa.
|
| If I crawl every week and see that A posted it on the
| first crawl, and B suddenly also had that content on the
| second crawl, I can infer that B stole from A.
| sanirank wrote:
| Maybe the good folks at Apple, Mozilla, Brave or Opera
| could implement this feature in their browsers? They're
| looking to increase their percent of browser use - it could
| encourage people to at least try switching over. Obviously
| would be popular among the HN crowd for developer
| documentation, but we could spread the news :)
|
| On the downside I could see this being used by terrible
| people to delist actual information sources so that they
| would only ever be served conspiracy theory sites in their
| searches as well.
| 1_player wrote:
| I don't think the first two companies you've mentioned
| care about making search better, as they're both getting
| a fat check from Google.
| hiyer wrote:
| True. If you search for any Python documentation the first
| links on Google are almost always geeksforgeeks, w3schools,
| etc instead of the official Python docs.
| smarx007 wrote:
| You should try adding "docs" to the query. "range python"
| shows w3schools at the top for me but "range python docs"
| shows docs.python.org first for me. Same for "html article
| tag" (w3schools) vs "html article tag docs" (MDN).
| judge2020 wrote:
| I think this is telling of how often the python docs
| actually solve peoples' questions. For example, I searched
| "python string replace", with the first 4 being
| tutorialpoint, w3schools, geeksforgeeks, stack overflow and
| at position 8 is the python docs.
|
| The issue with the python docs for this search is that it
| takes me to "built-in types", and starts off with things
| totally irrelevant to what I want. I now have to go
| searching for string, then find the built-in method
| replace. Meanwhile, the other tutorial-esque websites
| almost all show an example of str.replace above the fold.
| If you're Google and you're trying to get people
| information faster, you're going to promote the result that
| has more people not coming back to the search result page
| afterwards because it was hard to find the answer on that
| result.
| schmorptron wrote:
| This is true, and if you want the docs you can always
| just add the word docs to your query. Expecting the
| search engine to always favor one thing seems like it'd
| work well in this case for some people, but in other
| cases might get mushy
| vitus wrote:
| I personally configure custom search engines for things
| like this so if I want docs specifically, I'll type
| something like "py collections" which directs me to
| https://docs.python.org/3.10/search.html?q=collections.
|
| I find this especially useful since I often otherwise
| find myself typing site:python.org (or similar things,
| like if I just want to see the MDN page instead of going
| through w3schools or blog posts for examples).
|
| edit: in the particular example for str.replace, I found
| it buried in the results for "py replace", at the top of
| "py str.replace" (helps if you know what Python calls the
| type) and basically nowhere for "py string replace".
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Yup, python docs need to look at cppreference
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think string replacement in Python is a particularly
| egregious example because strings are core language
| types. Library docs are a lot better organized and a lot
| more easily indexed. This is just a problem with Python's
| docs in general, imo.
| xapata wrote:
| You want Google to direct you to the correct anchor on
| the page. That makes sense, Google should do that. The
| docs shouldn't be broken out to 1 page per method because
| Google likes to link to the top of the page instead of
| the relevant anchor tag.
| sanirank wrote:
| 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.
| VortexDream wrote:
| I'm getting these sites with Google too, so I don't think it's
| just a Brave Search issue.
| howolduis wrote:
| 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.
| KronisLV wrote:
| 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.
| 5560675260 wrote:
| For browser biggest UI difference is tabs - they squeeze
| instead of scrolling. There are no plugins that can create a
| proper sidebar, but out of the box you can organise them into
| foldable groups.
|
| Search results are noticeably better, especially for non-
| english and location-specific results. What's worse is image
| search - unlike with text you tend to get only 2-3 good,
| relevant results, everything else is only somewhat related. I
| suggest giving it a try even if you'll decide against browser
| switch.
| soundnote wrote:
| Stock Chrome has a flag that activates a combined two-tab
| reading list + bookmarks sidebar. Brave has the same flag,
| but for some reason the sidebar didn't list bookmarks the
| last time I tried.
|
| There are actually flags for enabling tab scrolling if you
| want, and tab squeeze is also adjustable via flags.
| 5560675260 wrote:
| Thanks, this really helped with a major pain point I had
| with tab management in Brave.
| soundnote wrote:
| UI wise the big thing for me are tab groups. They are
| straight crack, and the stock Chromium implementation Brave
| inherits probably my favourite.
|
| Apart from that, the main thing you can't adjust via flags is
| Chromium's style of using separate browser profiles instead
| of Firefox's multiple containers within one
| profile/window/session.
|
| The bigger UI differences are on mobile, where again, tab
| groups are crack and the implementation excellent.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| It still seems like such a simple technical problem to solve,
| albeit at large scale. Particular URL is blatant spam? Delist
| it. Keeps popping up on new URLs? Threaten to delist the
| hosting provider's address block. I'm more inclined to think
| that the reason these problems aren't solved is because
| there's little incentive to do it. The more time you spend
| milling around looking for what you're looking for, the more
| opportunities there are to show you ads.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Right, ad-driven search engines are fundamentally
| incentivized to provide results that are bad enough that
| you need to try harder to find your answer, but that are
| good enough for you not to switch (with a fairly high
| cognitive barrier to switching).
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _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
| mattwad wrote:
| This is really bad on Google too. I fixed it by installing an
| extension that lets me hide certain domains from results
| petepete wrote:
| This used to be a built in feature. Being able to block
| ExpertsExchange from all searches was incredibly useful. Now
| I'd do the same for Pinterest, W3Schools and apidock.com
| eloisius wrote:
| 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.
| Arnavion wrote:
| 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.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| It's a little weird to blame a third party for Google's
| ranking choices.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| Proven wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| whoisjuan wrote:
| 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.
| leodriesch wrote:
| 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.
| dx034 wrote:
| DDG also has widgets. But they don't have good localized
| results. That's where Google really excels. Any non-English
| search queries are just bad on alternative search engines.
| Maybe they're impossible to get right if you don't have
| programmers around the world or there's just no focus on
| those for the other search engines.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I think text search is what actually matters most. Image
| search, book search, maps, video search, widgets are just
| conveniences.
|
| I don't actually look for the widgets or Wikipedia results.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| 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.
| m0zg wrote:
| Brave is already comparable in quality to Google IMO, to the
| point where I maybe go to Google once every couple of weeks,
| if that. Superior, if you're searching for anything at all
| "controversial" that Google bans or demotes. And where it
| knows it's lacking, it gives you the option to mix in Google
| results if you'd like. I'm very impressed with Brave Search.
| I'm also disappointed and annoyed that Apple completely
| controls iOS search engine selection and doesn't allow adding
| custom search engines at all. Safari is the best mobile
| browser hands down, except for this "inconvenience". iOS
| Brave is worse than Safari, at least for me.
| silisili wrote:
| There is a growing sentiment, mine included, that Google
| search isn't getting better. In fact, I feel it's markedly
| worse for many queries. The problem for me are all the
| blogspams out there. These -should- be easy to just punt, but
| alas, they do not. I'd gladly switch to any search that
| didn't show me such results.
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't know if it's really Google getting worse or the web
| (or perhaps even the world) is getting worse. I have the
| impression it's more the latter than the former, and
| suspect other search engines will struggle with blogspam
| just as much.
| soundnote wrote:
| I think it's both. Google does seem to editorialize
| search results but the web's also becoming more obsessed
| with SEO and some sites are just hard to search, either
| internally or with an external search engine.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I share the sentiment. Unfortunately it means other engines
| struggle even more, because they are all using roughly the
| same basket of techniques. I'm familiar with the claims
| that DDG and Brave serve equally good or better results.
|
| An insightful breakthrough in quality that vastly reduces
| the computing and engineering required to serve great
| results that keep up with expanding information, similar to
| what Google did for search 20 years ago, would be
| wonderful, but it won't come from DDG or Brave unless they
| can develop new models that completely replace their
| current search products.
| psyc wrote:
| My growing disdain for Google isn't even about their tech.
| In the beginning, Google's SRP was an ad or two, followed
| by ~10 magically-relevant <a> links. For some years they
| were praised for a restrained approach.
|
| Today, the SRP is ads, the info box, the Reddit-cluster,
| the Quora-cluster, images, videos, "people also
| searched...", "did you mean...", and somewhere near the
| bottom a couple of those good ol' fashioned links for old
| time sake.
|
| Do not want.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high
| user expectations for search results
|
| The results are not relevant. Either the expectations are not
| very high, either they do a poor job.
|
| They actually had better search results before using very
| sofisticated algorithms and trying to outsmart the users.
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| 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
| Kiro wrote:
| > the tech required to compete with them is finally
| commoditized
|
| What are you referring to? Not even DDG has their own index.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Exactly. If I search for "red car" with quotes, I don't get
| why I get results about purple wagons.
|
| It's like going to a pub and ordering a steak and getting a
| burger instead. No, I don't want your damn burger, I am not
| going to pay for it, I'm just going to try another pub. But
| wait, there's no pub that delivers what you've actually
| ordered.
| Kiro wrote:
| Another hypothetical example that obviously doesn't give
| you purple wagons anywhere. Why not use a real example?
| Should be really easy if this is such a widespread problem.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 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?
| 1_player wrote:
| 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.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I switched to Brave Search after I saw DDG had some unfavorable
| hiring practices.
|
| I'm also ready to pay. After seeing Google censor search terms
| it doesn't like and promote results that ideologically align a
| certain way, I'm willing to pay for search rather than be
| subtly influenced by the richest, most educated people on the
| planet to act the way they want me to.
| curvilinear_m wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| nikkinana wrote:
| Great news. But nobody cares. And I'm shadow banned so fuck you.
| watrami wrote:
| 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.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Same boat, but after using brave search, it really is better
| (IME).
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| This is work by the Cliqz team they bought out, primarily. Just
| to give credit where it's due
| new_realist wrote:
| Can I download Brave's index and host it myself for truly private
| search?
| pmurt7 wrote:
| By the way, DuckDuckGo is no better than Google.
|
| DuckDuckGo said no. But when I reapplied as a black lesbian who
| can't speak English, they wanted me:
|
| https://lulz.com/community/thread/social-experiment-duckduck...
| mlk wrote:
| just apply as a FtM trans
| neiman wrote:
| 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.
| lopis wrote:
| 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.
| ecmascript wrote:
| Braver search works if you are searching in english but for my
| native tounge DDG delivers much more reliable results.
| howolduis wrote:
| are you still redirecting your users to referral links without
| their consent to make money in cryptocurrencies?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| 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/.
| midrus wrote:
| I'm an extremely happy Brave user since last year, and my default
| search service is duckduckgo. Not missing neither chrome nor
| google search.
| cortexio wrote:
| a basic test shows that brave search, just like google search,
| prefers mainstream propaganda over true facts. I cant tell to
| which extend because it seems like brave search only allows me to
| see 2 pages of results. There's no next page button or on scroll
| update.
|
| duckduckgo seems to handle this better. But there are even better
| ones which im not going to mention because i dont want anyone to
| change them.
| atum47 wrote:
| The last update broke the maximize button. But it's a good
| browser never the less.
| howolduis wrote:
| 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.
| zestyping wrote:
| 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!)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| You can write an user script to replace fonts if you use
| something like Greasemonkey.
| dx034 wrote:
| But if a large amount of users have that issue, that'll cause
| Brave search to fail. 99%+ of users will never use custom
| scripts, they'd just use the search engine that works out of
| the box.
| leodriesch wrote:
| +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.
| perihelions wrote:
| 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-...
| Kiro wrote:
| > everyone has uBlock installed
|
| I don't know anyone using uBlock. I know a few using AdBlock
| but that's it.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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.
| aqualinux wrote:
| Big tech bots are going to downvote you for saying this
| galgot wrote:
| 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...
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Agree with Joe too. It's like when you order a steak, and ask
| for a knife, and the waiter brings you back a spoon for you
| own safety. I would get pretty annoyed.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Joe is a magical thinker.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. What do you mean by that.
| yonaguska wrote:
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| can you give a specific example?
| ajvs wrote:
| 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...
| gilrain wrote:
| And he would know because why? He's a loud personality with
| an audience.
| HamburgerEmoji wrote:
| He related his personal experience of searching for
| something in Google, not being able to find it, and then
| finding it straight away in DDG, a search engine that does
| not try to do mass opinion shaping. No special credential
| necessary for that.
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| For reference, a picture of the results:
| https://i.judge.sh/forked/Party/chrome_TpfzKRLp5k.png
| ajvs wrote:
| He said "I'm looking for very specific people and very
| specific cases" in the following sentence. He's not
| referring to generic anecdotes.
| fouric wrote:
| 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"
| mehphp wrote:
| It's sad that Joe Rogan comes up as any kind of authority on
| anything besides mixed martial arts.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Why do you need to be an "authority" to talk about what you
| saw with your own eyes on a search engine?
| mehphp wrote:
| You don't think it's dangerous for someone with a
| platform like Rogan has to spread misinformation?
|
| That's what I'm referring to.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| No I think it's more dangerous when wide-reaching
| platforms like CNN spread misinformation about him and
| are completely unapologetic about it [0]. The most Joe
| Rogan has done regarding "misinformation" is telling
| people they should not get the vaccine and discussing
| vaccine side effects that, while yes they are not great
| in number, for every other platform it's a taboo topic
| for some weird reason.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHWkvaQmxvI
| mehphp wrote:
| > The most Joe Rogan has done regarding "misinformation"
| is telling people they should not get the vaccine
|
| I'm baffled by this comment and how that alone isn't
| concerning to you. All the experts say the vaccine is
| safe and effective, and yet we have people listening to
| Joe Rogan on the topic.
|
| Joe Rogan also claimed to have taken ivermectin and
| experimental antibodies and yet seems to claim that
| ivermectin is what did the trick. I don't know what his
| motivations are but he's clearly confused/misinformed.
|
| edit: to clarify, I'm not defending CNN in this instance
| at all. Both cases of information are terrible.
| busymom0 wrote:
| He's not anti-vax. People need to stop throwing labels
| around. It's equivalent to calling people the 4 letter n
| word.
|
| He's said repeatedly that he doesn't see the point of
| young fit and healthy people getting the Covid "vaccine".
| And especially not for kids. If you are old or have
| medical conditions or obese, then it might help you. The
| current shots are merely a potential severe symptom
| mitigator.
|
| Being opposed to a non-long term tested, short lasting,
| unaccountable shot which doesn't even prevent catching
| and transmission of the virus doesn't make someone anti-
| vax. Also opposing mandates of such a "vaccine" doesn't
| make someone "anti-vax".
|
| This is very specific to the Covid "vaccine", not for
| other typical vaccines like polio, measles etc which are
| long term tested for over 70 years (smallpox for 2
| centuries) and are also super effective at preventing
| catching and transmitting the virus.
|
| The current Covid shots don't even fit the definition of
| a vaccine as they don't prevent catching and transmission
| of the virus in any meaningful way. And even mild and
| asymptomatic cases have the same viral load as the
| unvaccinated which basically creates the problem of
| "silent spreaders".
|
| The definition of a "vaccine" is supposed to be: "The
| term "vaccine" means any substance designed to be
| administered to a human being for the prevention of 1 or
| more diseases."
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/4132#a_2
|
| The Canadian definition is: "When you're vaccinated, you
| build immunity (ability to resist infection). This
| protects you from getting the disease and prevents you
| from spreading it to others. Some vaccines protect you
| for several years and some protect you for the rest of
| your life."
|
| When something isn't preventing the disease, nor
| effective after 3-6 months, how can it be considered a
| "vaccine"? And how can one mandate it?
|
| As for "safe and effective", that's just become a false
| marketing term. How can you say that when 10 months after
| pushing the shots, they are discovering new rising side
| effects and Sweden, Iceland, Denmark are banning Moderna
| and Canada is not allowing it for under 24 year olds? Or
| 6 months later, they are restricting AstraZeneca and
| Johnson and Johnson? How can something be considered
| "safe" in this case? When something hasn't been long term
| tested, how can you trust the "experts" for it being
| safe? And since they wane off in 3-6 months, how are they
| "effective"?
|
| > claimed to have taken ivermectin and experimental
| antibodies
|
| He took what his doctor prescribed him. He specifically
| said that both the monoclonal antibodies and maybe
| ivermectin too could have helped him. He didn't say only
| ivermectin helped him. He also said that him being fit
| and healthy must have helped him, something most people
| don't even talk about.
|
| Just a few years ago, same people pushing the Covid
| "vaccine" used to say that drugs shouldn't be rushed and
| fda can't be trusted because one-third of the drugs
| approved by the FDA and (by inference) Health Canada from
| 2001 through 2010 had major safety issues years after the
| medications were made widely available to patients. This
| was more common for those given "accelerated approval".
| Follow-up period was 11.7 years and it took 4.2 years
| after the drugs were approved for these safety concerns
| to come to light. Given longer lifespans for youth, there
| is a potential for harm. So, it is perfectly valid for
| youth to be concerned about the lack of long-term safety
| data for the COVID-19 vaccines. Lack of this data makes
| informed consent impossible.
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-
| abstract/26253...
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2017/05/09/5275750...
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/health/fda-approval-drug-
| even...
|
| In the UK for example, the rate of cases is now higher in
| the fully vaccinated group in anyone over 29 age group.
| The 18-29 group will also soon be higher in fully
| vaccinated as the vaccine wanes off in 3-6 months. Yet
| everyone's blaming the unvaccinated instead of the
| ineffective "vaccine". Page 13 table:
|
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploa
| ds/...
|
| Please observe the nuances.
| bgarbiak wrote:
| > It's equivalent to calling people the 4 letter n word.
|
| No, it's absolutely different thing. One is derogative
| racial slur, carrying a baggage of slavery, violence,
| rapes, and systemic injustice that's present in the
| society to this day; and the other one is a description
| of people who _choose_ to ignore science and are willing
| to risk life of others basing on their anecdotal
| evidence.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I said "4 letter". You are confusing it with another
| unrelated word.
|
| > who choose to ignore science and are willing to risk
| life of others basing on their anecdotal evidence
|
| You clearly did not read the rest of my comment other
| than the first line which you also read incorrectly. And
| I didn't mention a single anecdotal thing in my comment
| so not sure what that's all about. So it seems like you
| are commenting for a specific agenda.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Well put.
|
| But I wouldn't waste much more time replying to this
| person, because they were recently asking HN for advice
| on how to use software to write a lawsuit they're self-
| litigating. Fifty bucks says it's some "MUH FREEDUHM"
| anti-mask/vaccine requirement lawsuit.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440576
|
| You're not changing their mind on something like this.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Am I back on Reddit? Such ivory tower elitism is what's
| wrong with intellectual authoritarians. 80% of litigants
| in my country are self-represented. You are showing
| elitism towards them.
|
| Also if you read that post you dug up carefully, I wasn't
| asking for "how to use software to write a lawsuit". I
| was asking what alternatives to Google Docs and Word do
| lawyers use. Those are 2 very different things.
|
| And you are agreeing with the person who clearly
| incorrectly thought of the wrong word even though I said
| "4 letter word". So you are okay with misinformation for
| your agenda. Nuance and facts are clearly not an
| expertise as you missed in my original comment.
| infinitezest wrote:
| Which of his claims are you asserting is misinformation?
| mehphp wrote:
| His anti-vaccination stance (specific to coronavirus, I
| don't know if he's anti-vax in general).
|
| He pushes ivermectin as a valid alternative to the
| vaccines when the data does not currently back that up.
| thehappypm wrote:
| His stance on covid in general boils down to "be healthy
| enough that you don't need a vaccine". He consistently
| argues that the real issue is obesity and that being
| healthy and fit (and taking vitamins) reduces the risk of
| covid to nearly nil for young people, to the point that
| even the small risk of vaccine side effects or unknown
| long term effects could be worth considering. That's not
| the same as telling people not to get vaccinated.
| ajvs wrote:
| He's not an anti-vaxxer. He is pro-vaccine for all other
| illnesses. He's also said he doesn't care if you choose
| to take it, just don't mandate it For all people when the
| science is not clear about the cost:benefit ratio for
| certain populations such as children.
|
| That being against mandating these emergency experimental
| COVID-19 vaccines for all individuals is being conflated
| as being an "anti-vaxxer" shows how much propaganda has
| caused some people to lose all rationality on this topic.
| phatfish wrote:
| Rogan says whatever it takes to keep his core audience on
| board, when he isn't just parroting the opinion of the
| last person he spoke to.
|
| His core audience are conspiracy theorists from his early
| days, which has a very big overlap with full on anti-
| vaxers.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if he still believed the moon
| landings were faked, he just realises you don't get
| million plus listens and a Spotify deal making that sort
| of thing public.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > when the science is not clear about the cost:benefit
|
| It is clear
|
| > emergency experimental COVID-19 vaccines
|
| They're not "experimental" and the emergency _approval_
| process is still extensive.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-
| biologics/vaccines/emerge...
|
| > What is the process that manufacturers are following to
| potentially make a COVID-19 vaccine available by EUA?
|
| > Vaccine manufacturers are undertaking a development
| process that includes tens of thousands of study
| participants to generate non-clinical, clinical, and
| manufacturing information needed by FDA for the agency to
| determine whether the known and potential benefits
| outweigh the known and potential risks of a vaccine for
| the prevention of COVID-19.
|
| > When the phase 3 portion of the human clinical trial
| reaches a predetermined point that informs how well a
| vaccine prevents COVID-19, as discussed and agreed to in
| advance with FDA, an independent group (called a data
| safety monitoring board) will review the data and inform
| the manufacturer of the results. Based on the data and
| the interpretation of the data by this group,
| manufacturers decide whether and when to submit an EUA
| request to FDA, taking into consideration input from FDA.
|
| > After FDA receives an EUA request, our career
| scientists and physicians will evaluate all of the
| information included in the manufacturer's submission.
|
| > While FDA's evaluation is ongoing, we will also
| schedule a public meeting of our Vaccines and Related
| Biological Products Advisory Committee, which is made up
| of external scientific and public health experts from
| throughout the country. During the meeting, these
| experts, who are carefully screened for any potential
| conflicts of interest, will discuss the safety and
| effectiveness data so that the public and scientific
| community will have a clear understanding of the data and
| information that FDA is evaluating to make a decision
| whether to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine for emergency
| use. > Following the advisory committee meeting, FDA's
| career professional staff will consider the input of the
| advisory committee members and continue their evaluation
| of the submission to determine whether the available
| safety and effectiveness and manufacturing data support
| an emergency use authorization of the specific COVID-19
| vaccine in the United States.
|
| Hmmmm, who to trust...a so-so actor from a 90's sitcom,
| or _hundreds_ of scientists
| mehphp wrote:
| I'm not conflating the two, I didn't say anything about
| his stance on the mandates.
|
| > That being against mandating these emergency
| experimental COVID-19 vaccines
|
| They are not "experimental" by the way, THAT is
| propaganda/misinformation.
| gred wrote:
| Please. I had to sign a 3-page liability waiver to get my
| COVID vaccine. I didn't have to do that for my flu
| vaccine, and never have.
| thehappypm wrote:
| All medicine is experimental to some degree, until you
| have years of data.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Why do you need to be an "authority" to talk about
| what you saw with your own eyes on a search engine?_
|
| Ask the GGP commenter? Why name drop if only the
| observation is important?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| 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.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > 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.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Nope, I'm not looking for misinformation. I said that
| Google's attempts at combatting misinformation often
| hinders my searches. Oftentimes, I'll be looking for a
| pre-print or something from a scientific journal that is
| tangentially related to Covid, but Google will basically
| spam the official CDC, WHO, and news articles urging
| people to get vaccinated.
|
| For any political news, sometimes I'll be looking to
| verify a story I remember reading from a few days or
| weeks past, or I'm looking to do my own fact check of a
| claim...and I'll find that several mainstream news
| sources will have republished the same story(not the one
| I'm looking for), unrelated to whatever claim I'm
| checking- similar only in sharing a keyword or person of
| interest- and Google rewards this behavior by pushing the
| trusted organizations to the top of my searches. It's
| like forum sliding, except it's search. Then using ddg or
| brave, the story that I'm looking for will often be the
| first result.
|
| It's a very insidious antipattern, because it's hard to
| even know if your perception is being actively screwed
| with.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| This is what drove me off the platform. Searching Bing
| (primary), Yandex (rarely turns up gold), and DDG
| (generally useless for the news) each seems to mitigate
| these issues. But you really shouldn't have to check
| three different search engines to not feel like you're
| being denied information.
|
| And yes, Yandex is a Russian operation, something to keep
| in mind.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Trying to look specifically for research papers on
| regular Google search is always a bad idea, covid or not,
| which is why https://scholar.google.com is a thing.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| ozten wrote:
| "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...
| buggythebug wrote:
| That's rather brave of them
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| 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.
| sdfjkl wrote:
| 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.
| smartpants wrote:
| https://search.brave.com/
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| How good is it for non-English content?
| [deleted]
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| 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.
| leoxv wrote:
| 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.
| gilrain wrote:
| The crypto button is removable. Have a look through your
| settings.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Specifically,
| brave://settings/?search=hide+brave+rewards+button
| agilob wrote:
| No one talking about how fast a browser company can move if not
| dependent on money from Google?
| paulcarroty wrote:
| 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.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| 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.
| howolduis wrote:
| 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.
| deadalus wrote:
| Brave is superior if you're searching for anything
| "controversial" that Google bans, censors or demotes.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| That's only really useful for anthropologists though.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Like what?
| tootahe45 wrote:
| I keep getting NFT and crypto advert-type popups which put me off
| using brave.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| There is a simple checkbox to turn those off. IIRC they even
| are opt in.
| przeor wrote:
| they have turn off switch for this?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Check out brave://rewards/
| gilrain wrote:
| 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...
| sadfev wrote:
| Brave is the last bastion of good open source commercial
| software.
|
| I will try to support them as long as they aren't bankrupt.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| 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.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| 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?
| wubin wrote:
| 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
| hutzlibu wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > the tank man image was blocked for the whole world
|
| The top story at the time
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635
| rglullis wrote:
| 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
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Do you welcome a search provider run by a bigoted anti-mask
| anti-vaxx nutjob?
|
| Because that's what Brave is.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I'd honestly rather have a search provider run by the CPC than
| by a cryptocurrency company, though naturally I'd prefer
| neither.
| wubin wrote:
| _> 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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...
| wubin wrote:
| 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
| didibus wrote:
| 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
| dpq wrote:
| 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.
| didibus wrote:
| Oh, possible, they weirdly disappear as I scroll down and
| don't have time to click them.
| beefield wrote:
| > 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.
| kangasp wrote:
| I often want to block domains. If you give me one more
| pinterest link...
| sharken wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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: Bai noYi Wei
|
| 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.
| schleck8 wrote:
| 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.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| 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.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Are you looking for the article on scienceblog or here on HN?
| Those are the first two results I get from Google when using
| the quoted string.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| Google, when used with double quotes and exact title, finds
| aggregator sites, but I was simulating looking for the
| original: https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/07/08
| /politics-i...
|
| Here is one more, search: Ten Elements of the False COVID
| Narrative
|
| Google: nowhere
|
| Brave: first result
|
| And it's not like Google just didn't index the site, it
| works for topics that are "less controversial", search:
| Universal Clock implies Universal Clockwork
|
| Google: first result
|
| Brave: first result
|
| Whatever the explanation - either Google censors some
| topics, or its search engine works differently - the result
| is the same, for this example Brave outperformed Google.
| Kiro wrote:
| None of your examples do what you say for me. I see
| everything on Google including your comments here.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| Interesting, let me share two screenshots of what I see:
|
| 1. http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/google_example1.png
|
| 2. http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/google_example2.png
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Do you get a Josh Mitteldorf scienceblog result for the
| search (no quotes): weight and aging a paradox part 1
|
| It's the first result for me with or without quotes. I'm
| curious if the site is somehow blocked.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| weight and aging a paradox part 1 (without the quotes) is
| first place on Google for me.
|
| Seems like google only fails on politically sensitive
| topics like unpopular opinions about COVID. I suspect
| they might be using a filter, or even a different ranking
| system for certain keywords.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| And perhaps only for some users. Can't help but wonder if
| location has some effect.
| [deleted]
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Weird, the first example appears nowhere in my first
| three pages of my Google results, but the Ten Elements
| one is result #1.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| It's odd, for the first example the exact article you
| were looking for is the first result for me whether or
| not I am searching signed in or from a private session.
|
| The second example, "Ten Elements of the False COVID
| Narrative", assuming you're looking for it at
| scienceblog, is the fourth result. Above the fold, at
| least. (Edit: Sort of nevermind, I missed that you didn't
| use quotes for that one. Without quotes the scienceblog
| page appears in slot 11).
|
| I am in the US and get my results in English, if that
| matters. I checked to see if toggling safe search changed
| anything, but nope.
| forgotmyoldname wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cyberpsybin wrote:
| "Google" "private"; unbelievable someone can put these two
| words in same sentence. Google cannot even pull pages older
| than 10yrs old at the moment.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google cares a lot about protecting user's privacy. Take a
| look at their privacy policy. For example, what other API
| provider requires you to get security audits ($15k-$75k
| yearly) when handling sensitive user data.
| goldforever wrote:
| lol...paid for by Google
| y4mi wrote:
| i think a lot of people never really understood googles
| business model.
|
| google absolutely wants to protect their users privacy from
| third parties. their ideal situation would be if they're
| the only one's knowing everything about their users so they
| can allow third parties to advertise things to their users.
| if they'd leak any of this information, they'd be
| compromising their main business model.
|
| so yes, people can trust google to do their everything to
| keep their information from reaching anyone else, including
| forcing said third parties to undergo paid audits to verify
| that nobody is leeching their user data.
|
| for some reason, a lot of people got it into their head
| that google literally sells information. i'm not sure why
| this ever started, as - at least as far as i am aware -
| google never tried to do anything even remotely like that
| soundnote wrote:
| This. Big Tech companies or their divisions are
| advertising _service_ companies and AI cults. They sell
| targeting, not the raw data. The data is useful for
| selling targeting services and feeding their AIs,
| actually selling it to others would be stupid of them.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Yeah...because Google and all other big tech want a
| monopoly on user data. Do you think any of them want to
| ever not protect user privacy in the way you defined it?
|
| They still have all this data on users. They don't even
| tell you what they have. They have the BS marketing of
| Google Takeout. It includes nothing about the profile they
| have made on me. The logs and data they have on what I have
| clicked, etc.
|
| Google wants to even protect you or I from knowing how much
| data they have. That's not the protection any one should
| want.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account.
|
| On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is
| continuously degrading.
| remus wrote:
| > On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search
| results is continuously degrading.
|
| Do you know of any publically available analysis that tries
| to measure search quality? And that shows that google's
| results are getting worse over time? It seems like a hard
| thing to measure, and a few people on HN saying "I searched
| for x and got garbage results" doesn't seem like the most
| robust thing.
|
| Less flippantly, people are notoriously bad at objectively
| remembering stuff. I certainly have no idea how good google
| search results were even 1 week ago, let alone 1,2 or 3+ or
| years.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Good job! $0.01 has been credited to your Google account.
|
| If anyone should be paying me it should be Brave for pointing
| out their weak spots.
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if it's just me being worse at using
| keywords to search for what I need but I've noticed that it's
| so much harder to find things that are actually helpful via
| google on stackoverflow etc.
|
| Most annoying thing is when I restrict keywords and they
| still show up on the search results.
|
| Now when I can't find something on Google, instead of
| refining keywords, I give DDG or Bing a go first (both not
| always successful but half the time I find more useful
| links).
| gremIin wrote:
| It's not you. Google nerfed search a few years ago. I
| noticed exactly what you noticed around 2016 or so.
| vincent_s wrote:
| Amit Singhal, who was Head of Search at Google until
| 2016, has always emphasized that Google will not use
| artificial intelligence for ranking search results. The
| reason he gave was that AI algorithms work like a black
| box and that it is infeasible to improve them
| incrementally. Then in 2016, John Giannandrea, an AI
| expert, took over. Since then, Google has increasingly
| relied on AI algorithms, which seem to work well enough
| for main-stream search queries. For highly specific
| search queries made by power users, however, these
| algorithms often fail to deliver useful results. My guess
| is that it is technically very difficult to adapt these
| new AI algorithms so that they also work well for that
| type of search queries.
| [deleted]
| dx034 wrote:
| Maybe on an absolute basis, but on a relative basis I still
| find Google results (esp for localized results) far above any
| other search engine. And that gap hasn't narrowed at all
| since I first started using DDG several years back.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| 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.
| afurculita wrote:
| 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
| gowthamgts12 wrote:
| are people still using brave after they have been caught multiple
| times -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
| nabaraz wrote:
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> 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).
| decrypt wrote:
| 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.
| nabaraz wrote:
| This looks great. I wish Nextdns provided this.
| decrypt wrote:
| I have used NextDNS in the past (pihole now) but I wonder
| what Whoogle does different from DNS filters.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| Wish they'd fix the bugs in basic currency conversion searches.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| "Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google
| (and other engines)?"
|
| Yes, simply add !g to your search query.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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.
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