[HN Gopher] Brave Search launches own image and video search
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Brave Search launches own image and video search
        
       Author : gripfx
       Score  : 194 points
       Date   : 2023-08-03 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (brave.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (brave.com)
        
       | NayamAmarshe wrote:
       | That's awesome! I've been using Brave Search for years and it's
       | my favorite search engine ever!
        
       | user3939382 wrote:
       | My priority for search is that it's free of political censorship
       | and weighting. Google is abysmal on this issue, then we had the
       | DDG CEO on here making excuses for his very clear statements
       | about Russian news sources. I don't need or want anyone else to
       | decide for me what qualifies as "misinformation" I will decide
       | that for myself.
       | 
       | It surprisingly comes up for image searching. Google for example
       | has been known to censor images of Tiananmen Square.
        
         | sundarurfriend wrote:
         | On the topic of "weighting", Brave Goggles allow you to decide
         | the weighting/ranking yourself, and is a great and under-used
         | feature. The UI is a bit lacking (you have to create a goggle
         | as a github gist/repo, publish it by submitting it to them,
         | then bookmark an unweildy URL that's the link to your custom
         | search engine), but the goggle syntax is pretty expressive and
         | easy to use.
        
         | wusher wrote:
         | this is exactly why i switched from ddg to brave
        
       | mg wrote:
       | As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search
       | engines on the web:                   Baidu         Bing
       | Brave         Google         Yandex
       | 
       | You can compare their results on this search comparison page I
       | maintain:
       | 
       | https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1
       | 
       | (If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and
       | Pexels, click on "more engines" to select all places you want to
       | search)
        
         | fsflover wrote:
         | One more, which is self-hosted, peer-to-peer and FLOSS:
         | https://yacy.net
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | silisili wrote:
         | Nice!
         | 
         | I actually like Brave here for my test better than Google. I
         | typed in a few cities, just wanting to see the skylines and
         | such.
         | 
         | Brave gives me good photos, some stock photos, etc. Google
         | gives me pictures from recent news articles, which isn't overly
         | helpful IMO.
        
         | SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote:
         | Shouldn't Kagi (https://kagi.com) also be on that list?
        
           | MildRant wrote:
           | Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but Kagi uses Google
           | search results. I'm sure it's more complicated than that and
           | they have their own secret sauce but it is not an independent
           | search engine.
           | 
           | See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html
        
             | Terretta wrote:
             | > _Someone will correct me if I 'm wrong but Kagi uses
             | Google search results._
             | 
             | Click two links down in the same menu:
             | 
             | https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html
             | 
             |  _Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional
             | search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like
             | Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-
             | commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI
             | for instant answers. Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our
             | crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on
             | non-commercial, high-quality content._
             | 
             |  _Our unique results combined from all of these sources
             | help you discover the best content you can possibly find
             | online, sometimes from the quieter places on the web._
        
             | anderber wrote:
             | I believe you're correct. Kagi just uses Google's API and
             | makes some changes on top of it.
        
         | isaacremuant wrote:
         | Brave is the one that censors less, from all those. Specially
         | doesn't censor for political motives that I'm aware of.
         | 
         | That already makes it worth of support.
         | 
         | But Google having become so bad of late has made switching
         | quite easy, even if brave is not getting better super fast,
         | Google unfortunately is getting worse and making up for it.
        
           | jorvi wrote:
           | I have a deeeeeeep dislike for Google's "must include: duck |
           | missing: duck".
        
           | yreg wrote:
           | Interesting, I regularly use both and I find Google to
           | perform better for me than Brave (in text search).
        
           | magicalist wrote:
           | > _Specially doesn 't censor for political motives that I'm
           | aware of_
           | 
           | What are the censored image searches you found?
        
             | reitanqild wrote:
             | Try to search for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and
             | massacre.
             | 
             | That tends to upset some engines including Bing I think.
        
               | yreg wrote:
               | Baidu doesn't show anything relevant as expected, but
               | Bing, Brave, Google and Yandex show similar results. Not
               | overly graphic, but the photos are there.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | ShrigmaMale wrote:
         | ahrefs
         | 
         | c.f. yep.com
        
       | qwertox wrote:
       | I'm always staying away from Brave because I've been confronted
       | so many times with bait-and-switch tactics that I have the
       | feeling that one day they will move away from being good and
       | monetize all the collected data, even though they don't collect
       | data.
       | 
       | I'm so skeptical that I'm just now starting to develop a feeling
       | of trust towards DuckDuckGo.
       | 
       | In the browser domain, Mozilla is the only company of which I
       | feel that it is genuinely pro-customer.
       | 
       | So I give all my stuff to Google and hope that they at least just
       | protect it from hackers, while I am aware that they analyze my
       | data in order to see how they can monetize me better, but at
       | least with anonymity in regards to 3rd parties. I just hope I'm
       | not wrong.
        
         | guerrilla wrote:
         | > I'm always staying away from Brave because I've been
         | confronted so many times with bait-and-switch tactics that I
         | have the feeling that one day they will move away from being
         | good and monetize all the collected data, even though they
         | don't collect data.
         | 
         | The thing is that it will always get worse. Every company needs
         | to grow in order to stay alive and eventually quality and your
         | user experience will suffer because of this, but here's the
         | thing: Always choose the upstart competition but just be
         | prepared to jump to the next up-and-comer after that. For me, I
         | found DuckDuckGo getting worse over time (probably not on
         | purpose, just spam) and somehow Brave is better so I'm sticking
         | with that, but as soon as Brave decides to fuck me (and they
         | will!) then I'll be jumping to whoever the new underdog is at
         | that time.
        
         | metadat wrote:
         | You should check these assumptions, Mozilla has been hard at
         | work enshittifying their entire portfolio. Instead of giving
         | the public features they actually want (the most secure,
         | performant, and predictable web browser), the current CEO has
         | directed the focus towards revenue-generating features.
         | 
         | My god, there is so much telemetry in FF now, and it's tricky
         | to hunt down all the about:configs to disable it. Not friendly
         | or privacy conscious at all. Do you really want Mozilla to get
         | pinged with your IP address every time your browser process
         | starts and exits? Yuck!
         | 
         | Quick FF enshittification example from 2 months ago:
         | 
         |  _Alert HN: Mozilla puts advertising into Firefox AGAIN_
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322 (48 comments)
         | 
         |  _Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage_
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642 (220 comments)
        
           | hipsterstal1n wrote:
           | > the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-
           | generating features.
           | 
           | They literally can't win. One group of vocal users is
           | outraged by how much money Mozilla takes from Google while
           | the other half screams about how Mozilla is trying to _gasp_
           | gain additional revenue streams that isn 't taking money from
           | their biggest competitor.
           | 
           | > Do you really want Mozilla to get pinged with your IP
           | address every time your browser process starts and exits?
           | Yuck!
           | 
           | No, but I really don't give a shit either. At a certain
           | point, I looked in the mirror and said life is too short to
           | care about stupid shit like that. If I was a spy or a
           | journalist in some state like China or Iran, maybe I would
           | care. But this feels odd to hone in on when any website you
           | go to is collecting all sorts of info of this sort.
        
           | cayley_graph wrote:
           | https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-
           | project/blob/main/mod...
           | 
           | I'm curious to see what you think about this. If you're not
           | okay with Firefox telling Mozilla your IP address every time
           | you connect, does the same go for Brave sending entire pages
           | of your search results to them? This also includes which
           | results you've clicked on.
        
           | soundnote wrote:
           | I mind Mozilla trying to find alternate revenue sources 0%.
           | It's a good thing: Organizations like Mozilla and Brave
           | SHOULD be making their own money and not be stuck to the
           | Google teat.
           | 
           | Mozilla doesn't go about it in as upfront way as Brave does,
           | IME, but stuff like VPN, Pocket and other browser-related
           | services I mind not at all.
           | 
           | I have no sympathy to the current political shitfest that
           | Mozilla is as an organization, but as makers of Firefox I
           | feel like Mozilla is in an impossible bind: Their users
           | expect a fairytale of an independent, donation-funded browser
           | that people spontaneously adopt, and go nuts about stuff like
           | the inclusion of Pocket. I know, I used to be one of those
           | people back when Pocket was introduced. But reeing about
           | Mozilla trying to have independent funding by giving people
           | useful services is just strange. It's exactly what they
           | should be doing, and Brave setting up revenue streams like
           | Talk and Search is great. Especially because they operate in
           | the normal money universe for those of us who aren't terribly
           | enthusiastic about crypto.
        
             | lern_too_spel wrote:
             | Brave sees Mozilla's political shitfest and raises a
             | political shitbacchanalia.
        
             | reitanqild wrote:
             | I also think it is great that browsers seek out alternative
             | sources of funding.
             | 
             | My problems with Mozilla are:
             | 
             | - Misuse of money: the browser team have brought in lots of
             | money over the years (we talk billions) and the foundation
             | is milking it dry. If the income created by the browser had
             | stayed with the browser team they would have had funding
             | for years to come.
             | 
             | - Being dishonest: Mozilla has sought donations for Firefox
             | and I think many of us have donated thinking we supported
             | Firefox, while in reality the Firefox team funds itself and
             | the rest of Mozilla and Mozilla isn't even allowed to send
             | money the other way.
             | 
             | - Not being up front about what they do: they more or less
             | lied about their relationship with Pocket. I like Pocket,
             | both the product and as a way to bring in income, but
             | whenever it comes up, everyone who was there starts
             | thinking about their lies.
             | 
             | - Nerfing the extension API.
             | 
             | - Writing "dear community members" in emails begging for
             | money while simultaneously being rude to us in responses to
             | real issues in Bugzilla.
             | 
             | Now, if anyone think I use Chrome, think again.
             | 
             | I am still optimistically waiting for authorities to wake
             | up and punish Google the same way they punished Microsoft -
             | huge fines and browser ballots - but that does not mean I
             | give Mozilla a free pass ;-)
        
       | nxrabl wrote:
       | That makes two companies who both maintain their own Chromium
       | forks and run direct competitors to core Google search products.
       | I wonder if we'll see Google start to close off open development
       | on Chrome - Microsoft will likely be fine, but that could put
       | Brave in a precarious position.
        
         | vanviegen wrote:
         | I'm not sure if they can without rewriting the whole thing, the
         | original (WebKit/KHTML) code base being GPL.
         | 
         | On the other hand, the Google lawyers seem to have found an
         | excuse to link some proprietary code into Chome (that's not
         | part of Chromium). Does anybody know what that excuse is, and
         | if it provides a loophole large enough to close off Chrome
         | development?
        
       | post-factum wrote:
       | I'd appreciate if it'd possible to select Czech Republic and
       | Ukraine as regions for search.
        
       | rejectfinite wrote:
       | Very nice! I just switched to Brave Search from DDG on Brave and
       | I kind of like it.
       | 
       | Now... I would just like to see the full https url on searches.
       | 
       | I already love the look, Brave summarizer AI and general results!
        
       | cheald wrote:
       | I'm very glad for this! I've been using Brave search almost since
       | it launched, and the standard results have gotten great, but it's
       | always been a bummer to have to go out to Bing/Google for
       | images/video. It's really nice having an alternative that isn't
       | just wrapper around someone else's search index.
        
         | em-bee wrote:
         | i have been using brave search for a while now and i was
         | surprised and am very satisfied with the search results.
         | missing image and video search was a bit annoying mostly in
         | that it linked to google and bing but not any other search
         | engines. but i just remembered to switch to where i wanted to
         | do image search instead. it sometimes meant that i had to go
         | back to retype my search query, but i'd rather have a good text
         | search than be bothered by that. in most cases i'd know ahead
         | of time if i wanted images so it was easy to pick the right
         | search engine.
        
           | AlotOfReading wrote:
           | I wonder what's different about our searches and
           | expectations. I've been using Brave as a default for 1y+ and
           | I still get consistently bad results compared to Google. The
           | only reason it's remotely competitive is how much Google
           | itself has declined in quality.
           | 
           | A recent example from my search history, "doors of stone
           | release date". The author has announced a new novella
           | releasing Nov. 2023, but not the actual book _Doors of
           | Stone_. The google infobox gets this wrong, but the first
           | result is correct. Brave accidentally gets it right that
           | there 's no release date for the book, but misses the novella
           | announcement and all but one of the results are blogspam.
        
             | mox1 wrote:
             | Overall Brave search has been good for me. I have been
             | using it as the default on every PC / Browser I utilize.
             | 
             | I will say there are times when it just falls flat. Like I
             | will search for a brand or specific thing , expecting to
             | get to the home / login page for that brand, and it just
             | flat out gives me weird results.
             | 
             | But when I put the !g in front of the query, the first
             | result is always what I wanted.
             | 
             | On the other than, when doing more general searches, Brave
             | is on par or better than google.
        
               | Eisenstein wrote:
               | > I will say there are times when it just falls flat.
               | Like I will search for a brand or specific thing ,
               | expecting to get to the home / login page for that brand,
               | and it just flat out gives me weird results.
               | 
               | Conjecture: that might have to do with filtering SEO'd
               | results. It is probably difficult to get rid of the pages
               | that are meant to look a whole like the legit brand pages
               | but not get rid the brand page itself.
        
             | ignitionmonkey wrote:
             | >I wonder what's different about our searches and
             | expectations.
             | 
             | The difference might be that they (including myself) don't
             | ask search engines for facts like "doors of stone release
             | date". They'll search for "doors of stone", find personally
             | reliable sources like Wikipedia, Fandom, Goodreads, browse
             | them and decide on an answer. When sources fail to appear,
             | they'll either refine the search (like "doors of stone
             | rothfuss") or call it a failure and maybe try a different
             | search engine.
             | 
             | This is one the reasons why Brave has been good for me so
             | far. When a relevant Wikipedia article exists, it shows it,
             | even if the title doesn't match. Whereas lately DDG and
             | others don't. In fact, you can see this with "doors of
             | stone". Brave shows "The Kingkiller Chronicle", DDG doesn't
             | at all, Google has it low down in the results.
             | 
             | It also shows Reddit discussions without needing to
             | explicitly filter for it. And I use ad block to remove the
             | AI summariser that takes up half the screen, it's not what
             | I want from a search engine.
        
               | Given_47 wrote:
               | Yea I do enjoy that new(ish) discussions section feature.
               | Anecdotally have found those to return more relevant
               | results than the old site:reddit.com in google
        
               | Ycdr4thfdd wrote:
               | The brave results are usually relevant for me, but I find
               | it struggles when I'm looking for something very
               | specific. Their indexing of reddit seems to have a lot of
               | gaps when compared with Google.
        
           | mrweasel wrote:
           | The search results are pretty good, but I can't work with the
           | layout. I really don't like that video results a so
           | prominently displayed, I don't understand why results a split
           | into multiple "boxes". It's way to messy.
        
           | SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
           | I'm a little surprised to hear other people having such good
           | results.
           | 
           | Brave search was my default for quite a while, until a few
           | weeks after they got rid of bing results. As soon as that
           | happened, stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be
           | there, and 90% of the time I'd follow up searches with !g or
           | !ddg just to get something decent to show up. The index just
           | felt severely lacking, or the relevancy was pretty far off
           | base.
           | 
           | Would you say search has greatly improved over the past month
           | or two?
        
             | cheald wrote:
             | I feel like it's improved steadily over time. I used to
             | find it severely lacking for anything code-related, but
             | that's improved, too.
             | 
             | It's not as good as Google was at its peak (and Google
             | itself has degraded severely in quality, IMO), but it's
             | good enough that I can generally find what I'm looking for
             | with a minimum of effort.
             | 
             | I run maybe 1 in 40-50 searches with "!g" because Brave is
             | insufficient, for context.
        
             | sundarurfriend wrote:
             | > stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be there
             | 
             | Exactly my experience. I hadn't connected it to them
             | getting rid of Bing results, but it makes sense. I've had
             | to use the bang redirects to other search engines a lot
             | more too, to a level I haven't had to in more than a year.
        
             | computronus wrote:
             | Possibly, at least for my own experience. It's much less
             | often that I rerun a search with !g. Brave Search's results
             | are becoming more relevant to my own queries, and Google's
             | becoming less so. Not to mention how ads like to masquerade
             | as ordinary Google results; using Google is starting to
             | feel less comfortable.
        
               | mrweasel wrote:
               | That seems to be the general case, other search engines.
               | Especially Bing and those based on Bing are yield
               | increasingly good results, while Google is just ads and
               | spam.
        
         | ignitionmonkey wrote:
         | Same here. Much like Firefox, I think it's important to use a
         | search index that isn't tied to the larger players (Bing and
         | Google in this case). I tried Brave a couple of months ago[1],
         | I found the results better than Bing, but without image search
         | it wasn't usable. Now I can give it another go.
         | 
         | [1]: https://jahed.dev/2023/07/01/trying-brave-search/
        
       | eviks wrote:
       | Very nice!
       | 
       | (though I've recently switched away from Brave Search since the
       | goggles subscriptions (the reason I've switched to Brave) have a
       | big bar right at the top and the whole top settings+goggles
       | shifts search results on load!)
        
       | whalesalad wrote:
       | I wish brave (and everyone else on the internet) would abandon
       | the poppins font it's nauseating.
        
       | pierrefar wrote:
       | The major problem with Brave search is their position about
       | indexing and licensing content against the wishes of the website
       | publisher. Their robot does not identify itself, meaning the
       | publisher cannot use the standard robots.txt to block its
       | crawling if the publisher so wishes. Incidentally, the robots.txt
       | file has been used in court cases litigating if a search engine
       | is legal or not.
       | 
       | Even worse, they state that Brave search won't index a page only
       | if other search engines are not allowed to index it. It is
       | morally not their right to make that call. A publisher should
       | have full control to discriminate which search engine indexes the
       | website's content. That's the very heart of why the Robots
       | Exclusion Protocol exists, and Brave is brazenly ignoring it.
       | 
       | Even worse than that, the Brave search API allows you (for an
       | extra fee) to get the content with a "license" to use the content
       | for AI training? Who allowed them the right to distribute the
       | content that way?
       | 
       | I wrote about all this here:
       | 
       | https://searchengineland.com/crawlers-search-engines-generat...
       | 
       | and more references elsewhere in this thread:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989129
       | 
       | Amusingly, while I was writing my article, this got posted to
       | their forums, asking about how to block their crawler:
       | 
       | https://community.brave.com/t/stop-website-being-shown-in-br...
       | 
       | No reply so far.
        
         | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
         | Curious why cannot selectively block using IP address instead
         | of user-agent string. According to HTTP specification, UA is
         | not a required header. There is certainly no technical
         | requirement for it in order to process HTTP requests. Of
         | course, any website could block requests that lack a UA header.
         | I never send one and it's relatively rare IME to see a site
         | require it, but it's certainly possible.
        
           | pierrefar wrote:
           | This is explained more in the article I referred to, but
           | briefly: Brave delegates crawling to normal Brave browsers,
           | so it's a huge IP addresses pool, not a single IP address or
           | range.
           | 
           | Also, these search crawls by the browser do not identify
           | themselves beyond the Brave standard UA header, namely a
           | plain Chrome user-agent string.
        
         | yreg wrote:
         | Hmm, I don't know, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it is
         | unethical to disobey the publisher wishes.
         | 
         | If you post something to the open web, what's it to you who
         | reads it and how? You can block some IPs but that's about it.
         | 
         | I don't know if Brave has a knowledge graph - if they do, I
         | would understand objecting if they filled it in with "stolen"
         | content. But I don't see what's the problem with search.
         | 
         | By the way, isn't everyone's favourite archive.is doing the
         | same thing?
         | 
         | I have no strong opinion on this, curious to hear counter
         | arguments.
        
           | CaptainFever wrote:
           | I'm just thinking that if website publishers are able to
           | legally allow Googlebot but block other bots, it might
           | contribute to the Google monopoly.
        
             | pierrefar wrote:
             | That would be bad, and it is already bad that Google and
             | Microsoft control so much of search queries, but the
             | decision about which search engine indexes a website is
             | purely the publisher's.
        
               | cvalka wrote:
               | No, it's not.
        
               | yreg wrote:
               | But why do you believe so?
        
         | cvalka wrote:
         | They are right and you are wrong. If some web page is publicly
         | available, it should be indexed. Scraping neutrality, please.
        
         | jaharios wrote:
         | This make me want to use Brave search now. When I use a tool I
         | expect it that it serves me, not the material it provides.
         | 
         | > A publisher should have full control to discriminate which
         | search engine indexes the website's content
         | 
         | If you want someone to not see what you publish block him
         | yourself. Also why would you want to do that? Do you want
         | google to own the web or something?
        
           | pierrefar wrote:
           | There is a a difference between a human being able to access
           | content vs a search engine indexing it (and in the case of
           | Brave, "licensing" it on).
           | 
           | I share your concern about Google having this much power, and
           | I'd add that Microsoft Bing is equally bad but gets away with
           | it because they're smaller. Still, the final decision about
           | which search engine indexes a website is purely the
           | publisher's.
        
       | JEDI-HACKER wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | butz wrote:
       | Good, but we need more alternative search engines, even very
       | niche ones.
        
       | andrewclunn wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | colordrops wrote:
         | What does being "woke" or "based" mean when it comes to
         | concrete issues you have using their products?
        
           | veave wrote:
           | In this context... well, bing hiding the tiananmen square
           | protests (mentioned in the article) or google returning a
           | list of exclusively black people when you searched for
           | "american inventors" are two incidents that come to mind.
        
             | smallerfish wrote:
             | Bing hiding "tank man" is not "woke" by any common
             | definition of the term.
             | 
             | Got a reference on the Google incident? Sounds like
             | misinformation.
        
               | veave wrote:
               | There are a few references online if you search for
               | '"american inventors" "google"' or something. For obvious
               | reasons it was never covered in any tech blog.
               | 
               | https://twitter.com/Micki_Harbour/status/8948713351046307
               | 84
               | 
               | https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/88a5hv/is_some
               | thi...
        
               | manuelabeledo wrote:
               | This is irrelevant.
               | 
               | How many references to e.g. Edison will you find online,
               | remarking that he was "white"? In a context of ethnic
               | debate in the US, mentioning "white" anything, will most
               | likely revolve around "black" anything.
        
             | creata wrote:
             | > google returning a list of exclusively black people when
             | you searched for "american inventors"
             | 
             | There's no way that's intentional. For starters,
             | DuckDuckGo, Google and Brave image search all do the same
             | thing here.
             | 
             | Maybe it's some weirdness involving "american inventors"
             | appearing in the phrase "african american inventors" or
             | something.
        
               | pixxel wrote:
               | Couple of google tests:
               | 
               | "Black man" "Black family" Results as expected.
               | 
               | "White man" "White family" A mixture of black and white.
               | 
               | "happy black woman" Results as expected.
               | 
               | "happy white woman" Lots of white women with black men.
               | 
               | Edit: DDG's results seems to fair better.
        
               | spookie wrote:
               | Can't reproduce these results.
        
               | veave wrote:
               | You don't see this? https://i.imgur.com/e5GaIgn.jpeg
        
               | spookie wrote:
               | No, I don't know what to say. I don't use Google tbh, but
               | as someone else commented on here, that's not a viable
               | reason either. I really don't know.
        
               | pixxel wrote:
               | I don't use google and actively block on my home network.
               | I've just tested with a clean VM using VPN in Sweden, Uk
               | and USA. All results are reproducible for me and are not
               | tainted with my browsing history.
        
               | spookie wrote:
               | Agreed, I do believe it's an artifact of a anglophone
               | dominated web (if you're talking about someone from your
               | country with your native language, you're less likely to
               | specify their nationality). I didn't mean to be toxic
               | with the dominated part or anything, I just think it
               | summarises the phenomena pretty well.
        
       | lern_too_spel wrote:
       | When will Brave Search launch a crawler update that lets me
       | specifically block its crawler in robots.txt like every other
       | search engine supports?
        
         | blacksmith_tb wrote:
         | I see they say "if a domain or page is not crawlable by any
         | search engine (it has a noindex tag), or if it is not crawlable
         | by googlebot, then Brave Search's bot will not crawl it
         | either."
         | 
         | 1: https://brave.com/search/api/
        
           | lern_too_spel wrote:
           | What if I want googlebot to crawl it but not bravebot? Every
           | other search engine lets me block its crawler specifically.
           | Only Brave has this shady policy.
        
             | bravetraveler wrote:
             | I'm conflicted - I see your point and agree; though I
             | appreciate that by using methods of others... we don't end
             | up with _more_
             | 
             | Loosely related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
        
             | hightrix wrote:
             | > What if I want googlebot to crawl it but not bravebot?
             | 
             | Then you need to gate your content such that it is not
             | available openly to the public.
             | 
             | This falls inline with many objections to Google's WEI. If
             | you host content openly and allow access freely, then don't
             | be surprised when people access it at will and use it for
             | free.
        
             | blacksmith_tb wrote:
             | Hmm, I agree it's odd, but 'shady' seems to attribute
             | malice to what could just be stupidity?
        
               | d_theorist wrote:
               | Or probably just an innocent oversight? I imagine they
               | might have taken this decision early on when they were
               | far too small for anybody to even think of not wanting to
               | be crawled by them, and just never revisited the
               | decision.
        
               | skilled wrote:
               | It's not so innocent,
               | 
               | https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-
               | for-ai...
        
               | lern_too_spel wrote:
               | Brave has a track record of malice _driven by_ stupidity.
        
           | cpeterso wrote:
           | Does the Brave crawler send the Googlebot or regular Chrome
           | User-Agent string? If it sends something different than the
           | standard Googlebot User-Agent string, you could dynamically
           | serve a robots.txt that blocks Googlebot to every client
           | _besides_ Googlebot. OTOH, I 've read that the Google crawler
           | sometimes users the regular Chrome User-Agent string and
           | penalizes sites that return different content to Googlebot
           | and Chrome.
        
       | msp26 wrote:
       | No mention of reverse image search sadly. I've been looking for
       | anything better than Google/yandex forever.
        
         | guestbest wrote:
         | I've been using tineye.com
        
         | porridgeraisin wrote:
         | Bing visual search is great. I use it in cryptic hunts a bunch.
         | Would of course prefer a non-MS offering though, I hope one
         | comes along that's equally good.
        
         | veave wrote:
         | Bing has its own and it's not bad.
         | 
         | Usually google+tineye+bing+yandex will yield some useful
         | results
        
           | CoBE10 wrote:
           | In the last few months Bing has been much more reliable for
           | me at reverse finding original sources of cover album images
           | that have been posted on Discogs. Google seems to not give me
           | images that have been posted a long time ago (10+ years
           | maybe), but Bing still does.
        
           | kilroy123 wrote:
           | If you're looking for people I was add pimeyes to that list.
        
         | davidm1729 wrote:
         | Hi, I'm David and I've worked along other engineers at Brave on
         | this! Thanks for your feedback, it would certainly be a nice
         | addition, although we may want to focus a bit more on quality
         | first. Thanks!
        
           | teruakohatu wrote:
           | Hi David, reverse image search is an easier problem than good
           | search quality. I am happy to chat with you about it, email
           | in HN profile.
        
           | qingcharles wrote:
           | Thank you for you and your team's hard work on this. To break
           | the small monopoly on image search is no easy thing and I
           | appreciate it.
           | 
           | It also explains why Brave Search is slow today I suspect...
           | :)
        
       | CoBE10 wrote:
       | Also reported here:
       | https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/brave_cuts_ties_with_...
        
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