Sometimes it pays to pretend
If you look at their marketing material, they claim to "use a variety of sources, 500+ to bring you your search results". This is of course technically correct, but the truth is they are a relatively thin wrapper on Bing results.
So yes, I'd claim it is a form of deception.
Right?
Meanwhile Brave Search or Mojeek provide more privacy, being independent at the same time.
Do they? Or have they just not had that "history" yet? I don't see anything fundamentally different in Brave that protects your and my privacy better than on DDG. I don't know Mojeek enough.
[1] https://search.brave.com/help/privacy-policy
Edit: mojeek claims the same.[2]
Are they still doing that?
Why does this same conversation happen every time Brave is mentioned on HN? Have any of the people complaining about Brave's crypto-whatever "problem" ever actually used it?
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515
> "Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist!"
> "We’re grateful to have access to Google's search technology and infrastructure for Kagi."
So I wonder what the actual results mix is. Like I said, could be mainly from Google.
Edit: Added additional quote.
Google is terrible at tech searches, without verbatim and now "web" search. Kagi spending work in this area, and indexing this area, might bear good fruit.
One wonders if the popular narrative around crappification of Search is partially self-induced to prime consumers for premiumization.
Qwant was also out of service today due to Bing API outage: https://www.gamingdeputy.com/bing-outage-exposes-qwant-and-d...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
[1] - https://search.brave.com/
[2] - https://yandex.com/
The “augmentation with Google” that you mention is an optional feature that only works in Brave browser and doesn’t mean Brave Search is less independent than in other browsers (but it might mean that the quality is increased for some queries; or at least closer to Google results in these cases).
I think when talking about independence it is important to make a distinction between “dependent” which means “cannot work at all if the provider goes down” (e.g. yesterday’s outage) and “dependent” meaning that the service would continue to operate but with some amount of degradation of service. It’s a spectrum. Yesterday we saw that some services could not operate at all when Bing was down.
Disclaimer: I work at Brave.
Given the trajectory of Bing this seems unlikely.
I think you’re making a huge assumption that nothing would change in 13 years!
Pre-configured keywords could be considered better than manually-configured keywords.
I might not be impressed, but as I get older, I skew toward out of the box experience over configuration. I rather learn, and then apply that knowledge everywhere the thing is used, than configure, and lug my configuration around. Therefore, I value an opinionated feature like the bangs in DDG, even though as a professional, I know that there are many alternatives to it. If I know how to do it with DDG, I can use it everywhere I load DDG: my personal computer, my work computer, my phone's browser, my phone's other browser, the browser in the VM, the browser in the VM in the cloud, on the freshly installed computer with its default settings, everywhere.
> # Where do DuckDuckGo search results come from? // Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience