I thought we were against Google et al. implementing features that keep people on their site instead of directing traffic to other parts of the web?

There's also something to be said about how Google should be returning information, not answers. Skip to the 1:00 mark in this Technology Connections video where he demonstrates how if you ask Google when the touch lamp was invented it'll pop up with a giant, confident answer of 1984, despite the fact that if you do the research yourself you can find the first patent for it was filed in 1954.

[1] https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw

I'm against Google doing it because Google is huge. I support Brave doing it because it's a useful feature and Brave is inconsequentially small.

Big things are not the same as small things, and should not be treated the same.

Should Brave's useful features be removed at a certain threshold if they see significant user growth?

As far as the thought experiment goes for making up rules, you could probably have a threshold where advertising ability gets cut off and it would do enough.

That's how small things become big, and then the cycle repeats.

So I guess you're advocating that this dynamic equilibrium and "circle of life" is just panglossian optimal?

The optimal is that nobody ever gets more than 25 (or whatever) percent of the market.

It's certainly controversial so all I can give you is a subjective viewpoint but yes, objectively these things make search engines more convenient but cut the traffic to the original websites by a small margin.

So far, I've noticed Brave Search only shows sidebar results for Stackoverflow and a few other popular forums that do not advertise on their pages directly, nothing else. So they're not really taking any revenue away. As for npmjs thing, I'm not sure if their revenue is hurt in any way because to view the package documentation you still need to open the link. Brave Search just provides you a copy command button extra for convenience.

As for discussions, they do not give full context so you always need to click the link so that's great for website owners as they get more exposure and traffic too.

At this point, Brave Search features are more on the UX side of things than anti-competitive so I personally will hold off the tinfoil hat for now.

There is no we on stuff like that, just vocal minorities and an apathetic majority.

Who's "we"? HN is not a person - not that an individual necessarily has a single, self-consistent set of beliefs themselves...

I was thinking the same thing. We can't complain about Google doing it but then give other search engines a pass.

I certainly am. Brave search putting answers in the sidebar is not a point in its favor, IMO.

Brave Search is pretty good for basic queries but it doesn't support most operators, even basic ones like quotes, making it less suitable for people who use their google-fu a lot. When I use Brave as my default, I have to fall back on DDG or Google much more frequently than I was falling back on Google with DDG as my default, and it's usually because I need to use an operator.

More on topic, they still use Bing's near-useless image search, so even if it's getting worse Google Images is seemingly the only decent option in that category.