Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different though. When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better
I know it's a fairly minor feature and one manipulated often by some websites, but I've still found it massively increases my chances of picking a relevant and up to date result. I didn't even realise how much I used it until I found myself getting extremely frustrated about its absence in DDG.
Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX too so I don’t have any big hopes for this. I like the idea of paying for a search engine, though. I would seriously consider that if DDG offered it.
Yep. The missteps that they've made over the past few years do not give me any confidence in the future of the project.
Furthermore, you don't get to choose what your "UX issues" are. "UX" quite literally stands for "users experience", which is on the other side of the spectrum from "developer experience". As a dev myself, I know it's difficult not to conflate the two, but acting like issues straight up don't exist is blatantly hostile.
I have no personal qualms against Brave. I'm just another developer who wants a browser, and Brave's naive featureset doesn't appeal to me: that's fine. I'm just helping other, similar users make the right choice.
Regarding user experience, I'm not just a developer of Brave, but I'm a user also ;-) Not only that, but I spend a lot of time speaking with users all across the Web, so as to understand how they're using Brave, what works, and what doesn't. I do feel uniquely qualified to talk about matter of UX when it comes to Brave.
I’m not posting this in fight mode, I sincerely hope it will help: this is user hostile.
You’re responding but you’re not listening. You’re certainly not asking. How could you be sure you know what the other people you interact with think if you feel uniquely qualified to talk about users’ experience and just brush by people who don’t feel supported in their own experience?
“Brave is full of UX issues” <<< “Brave allows withdrawing BAT to only a single wallet provider”.
Okay, the latter comment is way more useful to me, a lay follower than the former. And it only happens because you pushed.
I'm gonna have to agree with GP that you're responding too much. I don't even use Brave nor do I care but I still browse HN. Obviously different people will see things differently, but you seem very defensive and it makes you come across as difficult.
Like I said, I have no skin in this game. You are welcome to ignore what I say if you don't find it helpful.
If he came straight out and said "I don't care about your opinion and here's why" I would respect him. Instead he just talks over the people he's pretending to listen to.
His job should be to solicit feedback, not dictate it. And if he's going to dictate it I wish he would at least be upfront about it.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> We will be in touch when we are ready to release Neeva in your country. Thank you for being part of the Neeva team, we are so excited to build the future of search with you.
These might be small things compared to Google, but I’ve never experienced that DuckDuckGo did anything like it, so my trust in them is higher.
It’s like I can feel my eyes getting more tense as I do this.
That means that every single time I use the browser, the impression that Brave should not be trusted is reinforced in a very physical way. It’s not just a “brand impression” but a muscle memory.
- Reading man pages or official documentation sites before opening a search engine
- Thinking of more precise search keywords, as I got used to duck not helping me as much as google
Now I just prefix my query with !py and I’m immediately taken to the docs.
For clarity, I wasn’t trying to say DDG is better than Brave, rather agreeing with the parent that there are smarter tools for gathering information rather than relying solely on a search engine.
Google I find is still better for topics that are more idiosyncratic. But the bang syntax makes DDG a natural choice as default because many times I'll want to go directly to a specific domain search, e.g. !r or !nyt
No: When you use web search for professional work, such as searching for error messages or description of bugs of some software, any miss of somebod having encountered and solved them before can cost you days of work.
From my experience, Google is currently still the best at finding those.
This is exactly my experience. I have a "failed" search probably about a quarter of the time. Changing around the keywords can sometimes fix those failures... maybe about a quarter again are still stuck. So, yeah, ~5% failure rate. I inevitably try !g and am inevitably disappointed with effectively the same results (or lack thereof). Google successfully recovers a failed search maybe 10% of the time.
Moreover, is any search engine really at 95% success rate? I certainly have never gotten that high with Google, even back in the days when Google Search was good. Nowadays it's like 85% or so. About the same as DuckDuckGo for me. No matter which one I made my default, I'd have to check the other occasionally. (Incidentally, the same is true of satellite imagery. Sometimes Bing Maps is just much better for no obvious reason.)
I found myself having to second guess the results and then did a Duck / Google hybrid for a while, going to Google when I didn't get what I was looking for and eventually it was too much friction. I equate it with when I used to use two different text editors, one for speed (Sublime) and another (IntelliJ)for step-debugging because Sublime didn't have that part well implemented and it was just maddening to have to switch back and forth all the time and learn/maintain two sets of keyboard shortcuts etc.
I use !sp instead, same results and no Google tracking
(!sp searches on Startpage which in turn uses results from Google; according to both Privacy Badger and Brave Shields there are no trackers on SP)
FWIW I do get good results from DDG (sometimes better than Google) but that does require me to be a bit more thoughtful with my queries.
Now when I don't find what I need, I double check with g! ... once every 2 or 3 times, google do find what I'm vaguely remember exist and is out there.
Is never actual content, it's when I look for a specific one liner to copy paste and DDG do not deliver.
I can live with that.
The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean that DDG's results can't be as good as G's, it just means you need to add that context yourself. Like if you search for a coding problem, add your computer language name to the search query. Or if you're search for a restaurant, add in your home town too.
I've found DDG's results to be comparable to Google's and in fact in the last ~3 years of exclusively using DDG, I can count on one hand the number of times I've tried searching for something in Google after a failed search in DDG.
Image searching is a little more hit and miss though. G's image search is better -- generally speaking. However DDG doesn't include Pinterest spam. So if you're after something specific using image searching, Google is better. But if you're after a general list of usable images, then DDG is better.
Per DDG's own help pages, they use mostly Bing and no Google. (The mixture of over 400 sources that they claim is used to provide the infobox-type results, which they call "Instant Answers", not the regular search results)
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
I disagree. I've tried to switch to DDG several times too, and always go back to StartPage, which is a proxy for Google, and the results were always better even without profiling. There is a case to be made for Google having better results globally from aggregate user behaviour though.
No G, I didn't want to search for what you suggested, really not.
Once DDG is big enough, they will be forced to do the same.
Sure - this invades your privacy. But it leads to good results and a better experience.
You really don't want to give up your privacy in exchange for nothing. But this doesn't feel like the case here.
It's also just as good for location things. If I'm in different neighborhoods - I can type one letter in - and Google will pop up the right restaurant - and then in one or two clicks I can make an order.
This feels like a trade I can live with. I get it that a lot of people can't.
This definitely doesn't help in India. If you live in the US, Brave/DDG can probably serve you better local results. It's abysmal in India. Google local results in India are orders of magnitude better here.
I tried to use DDG, but now I don’t because I never knew whether it was just my DDG search that had been unsuccessful or whether there were truly no results.
In fact, I wouldn’t know with any search engine whether there are “truly no results”, so I use G because I prefer to get what’s widely accepted to be the closest results possible.
The only advantage I have seen in results is Google has removed nonsense and conspiracy garbage from their results.
It's the general rush towards infantilism. I want to see the kind of nonsense that has assuaged so many people into effective insanity and apparently Google has decided that I'm not enough of an adult to view it.
It's like their Android dictionary. It lacks lots of words that I have to go and check manually because they've decided that someone using a nuanced word is only done in error
Or with their search where they remove all the important stuff from the query and return the results that I was specifically trying to avoid with those important modifiers "there's not many results with x" - Yes! That's the point.
All over the place they're just on some endless campaign to patronize the userbase. From the address bar that simply just refuses to do http: to a painfully dumb search in Gmail, it's really a company wide systemic problem they need to address.
At least back in the say AOL days, which were renown for this kind of mentality, they kept things at a stable sophistication for the lifetime of the product. It wasn't in some unending rush to become ever more stupid and childish with every subsequent release
I don't mind a company profiling me. A lot of Google's cross interacting products work great(Gmail to Calendar and Maps, for example). I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my data. A guy can dream...
Not everyone has that luxury.
> I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my data
Then your data is worthless to them. Nobody wants companies to abuse their personal data, that's why it's such a lucrative business. Companies like Apple and Brave get away with it by edging out competition and instating their own standards (see: Brave's Ad "replacement"). It's all so ridiculously asinine that it makes me want to uninstall every piece of software from my computer and use it exclusively as a space heater for the rest of my life.
This is precisely the point. It should be worse than worthless, it should cost them money. And they should charge that to me, plus some nominal fee. I guess that's what I'm asking for.
Brave is rescuing the Web from a block-alone response, which starves content creators of much-needed support. Brave also increases the potential for support by giving users without disposable income (and those with disposable income) the ability to support those who make the Web enjoyable. We do this in a manner which is low-friction, and anonymous too (thanks to the Basic Attention Token).
Brave has introduced a model that understands the security and privacy reasons for blocking third-party ads and trackers. But Brave doesn't stop there (as is the case with popular blockers); it also aims to address the issue of content sustainability online.
> Not everyone has that luxury.
Defend that statement.
Google doesn't sell your data.
They sell the opportunity for companies to place their ads based on Google's placement algorithms, which use your data.
There is a big difference, and while I don't expect the general population makes the distinction I think on HN people should understand this.
You can get pretty close to that by buying YT Premium [if you watch YouTube] and using an adblocker everywhere else, and this gives Google the non-ad-based monetary incentive to profile your viewing habits to show you more videos it thinks you'll like without optimizing for Ads.
Lately I've noticed a weird problem with DDG where it will load a blank page of results. The page header with logo and search bar is there, but the white part of the page that has results never loads. Even after refreshing multiple times it's the same, but trying a different query fixes it.
If Brave can manage to produce higher quality results while weeding out SEO spam I will definitely subscribe.
I've noticed the same problem too. My guess is that DDG pulls search results from 3rd-party engines such as Bing and for some technical issues it may fail from time to time.
Right now google knows a lot about you and uses it to refine the search results, if you remove tracking - quality drops. But if you at least let the user tell the engine that "I'm a programmer, gamer, geek, whatever" it might just do the trick to counterweight that.
In a nutshell, community-curated lists of rules to deeply change the way our core ranking algorithm surface content and influence the results you see for a given query.
If I made a site that claimed to help you with your math homework and simply sent the queries to WolframAlpha, that would also not just be "scraping."
(But, again, there's a difference between scraping and echoing a request on another site and waiting for its response. The latter is basically unauthorized use of its API, not scraping.)
My guess is Google's "donation" is pennies on the dollar from what they benefit from Wikipedia, and more of a token gesture than anything else.
Can you be more specific as to your claim? Not illegal in what sense(s)? And what is your basis for the claim?
I'm not a lawyer, but saying "violating a website's ToS is hardly illegal" is fraught advice.
While individuals may get some leeway when it comes to ToS violations (see [1] and [2]), I would expect companies scraping and/or extracting content would be treated differently.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/07/court-violating-terms-...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/court-violating-...
[3]: https://www.octoparse.com/blog/10-myths-about-web-scraping
[4]: https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/1202610687621/?s...
Google Search results are definitely "public data" so long as Google provides them to anyone who asks.
Again, if scraping data from websites without permission, Google simply wouldn't exist. Bear in mind, robots.txt is a feature that Google and Microsoft choose to respect, but the default assumption search engines have made from the beginning, is that they are free to grab whatever they want from the web, unless you ask them otherwise to please not.
Which Google's robots.txt does.
> scraping search results isn't illegal, by any means
While scraping the results for yourself to look at might be OK, scraping results to display verbatim in another search engine without permission stretches fair use.
No, it doesn't, because Google results aren't copyrightable, hence, there is no such thing as fair use. It's just information anyone is free to collect and use as they see fit.
If a monkey can't copyright a selfie because they're not a person, an algorithmically generated spew of stuff Google ripped from elsewhere certainly lacks merit for copyright.
1. Redirection to Google.
2. Piping Google's results back to Brave Search's UI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27594754
The original commenter was asking about the latter.
Check query result -> realize the result is bad -> scroll back to the search bar -> place cursor at the beginning of the query -> enter "!g" -> redirect to Google.com
It is not too bad on desktop, but doing it once on a smartphone is more than enough to push me to switch back to Google.
So I just prepend based on what I'm searching for to begin with instead of after a failure. But I've also been using duckduckgo as my default for over a decade so I've gotten used to it.
command ddgGoogleBang composite js (new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)).get('q') + ' !g' | urlmodify_js -q q | open / <c-e> !g <enter>i would rather support and spread the word about search engines that don't rely solely on google
Yes, same applies to DDG/Bing though.
In an indirect way, it’s possible by doing !sp on DDG, which redirects the search to startpage, which shows untracked google results.
then it seems they're being quite slow, since the acquisition happened almost 2 years ago.
We'll see which comes first. That post, or "Our Great Journey."
1. Search ads are the primary source of malware and fraud on the Internet today. (Phishing emails are second.) Sites pretend to be other sites all the time, and to allow tracking and landing page behaviors, every major search ad provider allows ads to "lie" about the destination domain. So you may see an Amazon ad, it says it goes to Amazon.com, but actually directs through to realamazonlinkipromise.biz instead. Fraud's really profitable, so fraudsters win ad slots easily, and are adtech companies' best customers, so there's really little incentive to crack down on this.
2. Search ads use this placement as a form of extortion. If you run, say, Best Buy, you shouldn't have to buy search ads for "best buy", because obviously you're the best result. However, they have to, because if they don't, the search engine will sell ads to their competitors using their keyword, so people searching "best buy" get "Circuit City" as the top result instead. (Yes, I chose that reference in part because I don't want to shame any real current companies in this example for sleezy practices.) And since users click the top result (the ad), not the first organic result, Best Buy ends up paying for every click for every user who goes through Google/Bing/etc. to get to Best Buy.
The second reason is why browsers are so obsessed with combining the search and address bars: They want you to search "best buy" or "bestbuy" or etc. because that's ad revenue, whereas actually typing bestbuy.com nets Google nothing.
One thing to note is that the cost of the ad is based on the landing page relevance (and even more so for branded terms), and so in your example Best Buy would be able to buy the ad for the "Best Buy" keyword for pennies (a rounding error on their SEM campaign, I'm sure), while Circuit City would have to pay a whole bunch for the "Best Buy" keyword.
Given that, I don't mind it so much. It's a good way for a competitor to get their name out there, but it's not really a sustainable practice long term for them. There's built-in pressure favoring the incumbent on their own terms.
Honestly, what Google and Microsoft and such are doing in this case is trademark theft. They are selling the search result for a trademarked name they don't own, and when the actual trademark owner wants to be found by their own name... they have to pay for it.
I don't know who is going to file the case, but sooner or later, someone should, because it's a slam dunk.
This seems like the real problem, not search ads as a concept
> So you may see an Amazon ad, it says it goes to Amazon.com, but actually directs through to realamazonlinkipromise.biz
Just disallow that? Problem solved.
If you want yet another filter, only allow public companies or companies that have raised >10M on Crunchbase to advertise, and have them verify that they are really who they are by asking them to put some string of your choosing in their DNS records.
Sure, Google could disclose real advertisement destination URLs tomorrow if they wanted. But the marketers are their customers, and that would upset their customers quite a bit. Especially since a lot of their customers' entire purpose in paying for Google Ads is to exploit that particular feature.
But in the race for better ad performance, they introduced tracking & retargeting & profile building while at the same time both minimizing the visual difference between ads & organic as well as nearly pushing organic of the first page.
The only products we put paid promotion on are common and overpriced, and the demographic of the customers is very different to what we'd find through our products sold through organic search.
Based solely on anecdata through the messages we receive and the addresses we ship to, the people who click on ads are somewhat more likely to be lower-socio, much more likely to have low literacy skills, and a couple of orders of magnitude more likely (not an exaggeration) to live in a remote Aboriginal community.
It feels somewhat dirty/exploitative, but it's what the customer wants. They have the choice of saving $50+ by scrolling past the first 3-4 results, but they choose not to. I just don't understand.
I didn't realize this until I installed Sponsorblock which got rid of the last ads I was seeing there. Suddenly I could focus on whatever they were creating and the video was talking about without having my attention diverted to something else.
Maybe that is just me, but that is why I now mind ads.
That's... an interesting way to put it. I can't really twist and turn it into the truth though. Smells like it was put through a lot of PR.
>However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page.
This is something almost all of the search engines outside Google and Bing does. DDG does this with Bing for example.
As far as I can tell the only "new" in this will be that the same thing is done again by another company.
In 1998 when Google's founders announced their search engine they claimed it would be less commercial, more academic, more transparent and they would avoid the influence of advertising. Did things "go as planned." Not even close. What is the lesson here.
Meanwhile, every search submitted during the "beta" period is subject to none of those limitations.
"So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result is on the same page, or just one click away."
Brave is not the first to do that. Check out Gigablast, for example. If I am not mistaken, they also claim to use an "independent index". At least, they provide the source to a crawler and server.^1 That is what people should be excited about. Not Gigablast per se but the idea of an open source search engine that anyone can run. searx is another project worth looking at.^2
How many ways are results promoted and demoted; what are the factors used. Are these search engines that comenters are recommending in this thread transparent. (Making promises on a blog is not "transparency" IMO.) Where is the source code. What are the various server settings that alternatives like Google, DDG, Brave, Startpage, etc. never provide to users. This stuff should matter, yet the discussion of search engines always seems to devolve into personal usage anecdotes and "search shortcuts". Every user has different needs and preferences.
There are many knobs in web search that advertising-supporting tech companies providing "search engine" websites will never let users twiddle. The source code for those servers is not public.
1. To get an idea of type of settings users of popular search engines are not being allowed to control:
(Scroll down to "SEARCH CONTROLS") https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gigablast/open-source-sear...
2. https://github.com/searx/searx
For a current list of searx public instances
curl https://searx.space/data/instances.json|grep -Eo '(A\+", .[^"]*.{4}[^"]*)'|cut -d/ -f5|uniq|sed 's>.*>https://&>'I just gave the docker image a try. It works out of the box but the search time feels slightly more than that of Google - which is one of the reasons I gave up on DDG.
Also, I am curious - if I am hosting it on my own server and using Google as one of the engines - does that not mean my search ultimately goes to Google and they can still profile me?
Who knows what the people running those instances do with the search data they acquire.
What I like about searx though is the list of search engines it potentially targets. Comprehensive lists of search engines on the internet are always valuable. I see searx as a supply of "parts" with which one can make something of their own. I have made a metasearch utility for myself.
B. Search from command line
C. Can open an index.html of saved search results in any browser; each query gets its own SERP; search results are saved in a directory that can be tarballed and compressed allowing simple transfer to any computer with a UNIX userland
D. Easy to add new sites; follows a failry standard template; currently at only eight sites, but adding more (like the ones in searx)
E. Requires only standard UNIX utilities; consists of small shell scripts of less than 2000 chars
F. Fast; no cruft
Unique features:
1. Streamlined SERP; URLs only, minimal HTML, i.e., <a>, <pre>, <ol>, <li>, <!-- -->; no images, Javascript or CSS; SERP contains timestamps in HTML comments to indicate when each query was submitted
2. Each SERP contains deduped batches of results from different search engines; source search engine indicated by short prefix; if desired, can resort to intersperse results from different sources, e.g., sort by URL
3. Continuation of search; allows retrieval 100s of results by spreading searches across periods of time too long for websites to track, thus allowing retrieval of large numbers of search results while avoiding ridiculously small result limits or temporary bans for "searching too fast" <--- I could not find anyone else using this approach
4. By default only minimum headers sent; custom headers can be sent when appropriate for particular site, e.g., DNT to findx.com; allows for complete customisation of presence/absence/content/order/case of HTTP headers, thus can potentially emulate any browser or other HTTP client (also supports HTTP/1.1 pipelining which curl cannot do)
5. Can be used with any TCP client; not limited to one library, e.g., libcurl; works great with proxies like stunnel and haproxy
6. URL params or hidden form fields that can potentially be used to link one SERP with another SERP are removed or rendered ineffective
Regarding number of pages of results, please see my answer on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597911
TL;DR: we currently show the equivalent of 2 pages of results and will consider more in the future.
So, just use https://startpage.com/ and get proxied Google results. Searx is another alternative.
I use DDG for my main search, but there is the !g (i think) that you can prefix a search with to get it sent to google through DDG.
Hmm...
> Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page.
That's also what DDG does. If you don't like DDG, odds you'll like some even smaller effort are quite to zero.
StartPage shows Google results through a proxy for improved privacy. I am quite happy with it.
What has happened with this investment, we've hired additional engineers and added new features.
And, System1 doesn't receive any user personal data because we don't collect it and never will. Why did System1 invest? "System1 is interested in Startpage's ad revenue, not its data" Source: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4017337/privacy-focused-sea...
Been with them for about a decade but this is too much
JS: Startpage does use Javascript, but only to enhance user interaction with our site and improve the search results we provide.
ADs: Startpage displays at most 3 ads. Like other private search engines, Startpage's revenue model is based on contextual ads.
Let me know if you have questions or suggestions.
I have been using Startpage for a while. It's results are same as Google, but with zero tracking. But it puts (non-personalized) ads in results.
> In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark (#!) at the beginning of a script. It is also called sha-bang,[1][2] hashbang,[3][4] pound-bang,[5][6] or hash-pling.[7] - Wikipedia
> Bangs are shortcuts that quickly take you to search results on other sites. For example, when you know you want to search on another site like Wikipedia or Amazon, our bangs get you there fastest. A search for !w filter bubble will take you directly to Wikipedia. -DDG
Why are we OK with these free services literally stealing Google results? Could you imagine the backlash if it was discovered that Google was doing the same for its results by stealing from DDG or another, smaller player?
Google is taking page content from sites and putting it on their own search result page; Brave is taking search-result links from Google and putting them on their own search result page.
If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine. I can't express how exciting this is to me.
Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up changing the default search engine back to Google. I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand. I would imagine Brave Search to have similar issues, at least in the beginning, but they did something smart to make it less painful:
> Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page.
So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result is on the same page, or just one click away.