Hacker News
2 years ago by eloisius

Iā€™ve been using Brave search for several months now. I switched the day that it was announced. The quality is fairly good, but Iā€™m having troubling telling whether itā€™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.

Iā€™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).

2 years ago by amelius

> 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.

2 years ago by BrendanEich
2 years ago by Isomorpheus

This is an exciting idea, but the style of the paper is off-putting. It's written in the style of an academic paper, while clearly eschewing associated norms like not giving blatant opinion or waxing philosophical.

"The rationale is not to customize the ranking according to the implicit interests of the user, but to offer a mechanism to define multiple rankings, plural, open and explicit, for only if it is so, can it be trusted."

Please put opinions in a blogpost and uphold the (reasonable) norms of the research community, for only if it is so, can your work be trusted.

2 years ago by jerjerjer

pinterest. Bane of all image searches.

2 years ago by MiddleEndian

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.
2 years ago by Minor49er

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.

2 years ago by jader201

Itā€™s a bit ridiculous, really. I actually donā€™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?

2 years ago by micromacrofoot

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.

2 years ago by bradleyankrom

I canā€™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.

2 years ago by skymt

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...

2 years ago by generallee5686

Yes! I swear I remember banning some of those spam domains in 2010 or so. IIRC, I thought it was part of Google search.

2 years ago by matheusmoreira

They sure want to improve their own user experience. The "use your information to make tons of money" experience.

2 years ago by eloisius

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.

2 years ago by Arnavion

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.

2 years ago by alisonkisk

It's a little weird to blame a third party for Google's ranking choices.

2 years ago by userbinator

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.

2 years ago by eloisius

Mirrors can exist without gaming search to supplant canonical sources

2 years ago by Proven

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.

2 years ago by undefined
[deleted]
2 years ago by tommica

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.

2 years ago by BarryMilo

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.

2 years ago by hutzlibu

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.

2 years ago by rchaud

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.

2 years ago by matheusmoreira

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.

2 years ago by Consultant32452

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?

2 years ago by lobocinza

There's a Chromium extension, uBlacklist, that does something similar. You can blacklist sites from search results and also whitelist so those are highlighted.

2 years ago by potamic

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?

2 years ago by tommica

Need to try this out!

2 years ago by RileyJames

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 braveā€™s approach that was interesting to me. Itā€™d be disappointing if they dropped it.

Brave Goggles: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf

2 years ago by marginalia_nu

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

2 years ago by freediver

>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

2 years ago by hbn

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.

2 years ago by freediver

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

2 years ago by SllX

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.

2 years ago by jeroenhd

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.

2 years ago by rglullis

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

2 years ago by jeroenhd

This is true for their normal search, but for their image search they always seem to say "results from third parties" if you click the info button.

Maybe their image search just hasn't encountered enough websites featuring the word "bird" or maybe their disclaimer is shown more often than intended, but I get the idea that image search is always done externally.

2 years ago by k__

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.

2 years ago by beefield

> 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.

2 years ago by kangasp

I often want to block domains. If you give me one more pinterest link...

2 years ago by Ageodene

They are indeed using Bing:

>However for some features, like searching for images, Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing.

Source: https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/

2 years ago by yonaguska

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.

2 years ago by that_guy_iain

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.

2 years ago by LMYahooTFY

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.

2 years ago by that_guy_iain

> 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.

2 years ago by sokoloff

Iā€™m generally happy with Googleā€™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.

2 years ago by KennyBlanken

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.

2 years ago by ajvs

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 wasnā€™t finding them on Google,ā€ Rogan urged.

[1] https://summit.news/2021/10/19/video-joe-rogan-accuses-googl...

2 years ago by mehphp

It's sad that Joe Rogan comes up as any kind of authority on anything besides mixed martial arts.

2 years ago by symlinkk

Why do you need to be an ā€œauthorityā€ to talk about what you saw with your own eyes on a search engine?

2 years ago by mminer237

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.

2 years ago by fouric

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"

2 years ago by ajvs

He said "I'm looking for very specific people and very specific cases" in the following sentence. He's not referring to generic anecdotes.

2 years ago by judge2020

For reference, a picture of the results: https://i.judge.sh/forked/Party/chrome_TpfzKRLp5k.png

2 years ago by gilrain

And he would know because why? Heā€™s a loud personality with an audience.

2 years ago by HamburgerEmoji

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.

2 years ago by jccalhoun

can you give a specific example?

2 years ago by skinkestek

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.

2 years ago by pmurt7

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.

2 years ago by wolpoli

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?

2 years ago by soundnote

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.

2 years ago by pmurt7

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.

2 years ago by jozzy-james

ah yes, the coronavirus...the thing that made everybody not use the internet

2 years ago by zionic

FWIW, I had been using Firefox since it was called ā€œMozillaā€ and I switched to Brave last year. Firefox under her ā€œleadershipā€ is a disaster.

2 years ago by sam_goody

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.

2 years ago by sf_rob

>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.

2 years ago by BrendanEich

I was influencer only until 2013 when I took over engineering, so Iā€™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 elseā€™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.

2 years ago by magicalist

> 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.

2 years ago by BrendanEich

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?

2 years ago by OneLeggedCat

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.

2 years ago by andai

You'll have to stop running JavaScript, too ;)

2 years ago by undefined
[deleted]
2 years ago by acatton

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), ā€¦

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...

2 years ago by jonathansampson

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.

2 years ago by moystard

The latter is still valid for Ethereum until the update to ETH v2 and Proof of Stake is live. We are not there yet.

2 years ago by _han

When is this expected to go live? I thought we'd be there by now.

2 years ago by NoGravitas

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 ā€” objectively worse, but not clearly compromised.

2 years ago by soundnote

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 Moneyā„¢. 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.

2 years ago by hunterb123

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.

2 years ago by skyfaller

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.

2 years ago by charcircuit

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: ē™½ć®ę„å‘³

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.

2 years ago by _fnhr

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.

2 years ago by notreallyserio

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.

2 years ago by _fnhr

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.

2 years ago by forgotmyoldname

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.

2 years ago by schleck8

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.

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2 years ago by DeathArrow

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.

2 years ago by 1_player

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.

2 years ago by banana_giraffe

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".

2 years ago by cromwellian

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.

2 years ago by 1_player

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.

2 years ago by _tnyw

I wish there was a mode for "do as I ask"

2 years ago by Kiro

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.

2 years ago by Kye

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.

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2 years ago by mrtksn

Every NLP AI is like that, itā€™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 Iā€™m curious if they have DHL but I really donā€™t feel like explaining it to you. Could you please simply donā€™t assume stuff by default? I appreciate the ā€œdid you meanā€ suggestions but letā€™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 itā€™s like ā€œNorth Korea DHL? You must be trying to send a package to Republic of Koreaā€. Maybe thatā€™s because thereā€™s not much ad revenue from helping out people to get information about DPRK.

2 years ago by Kiro

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?

2 years ago by mrtksn

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.

2 years ago by DeathArrow

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.

2 years ago by gremIin

They're using AI for everything now.

2 years ago by undefined
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2 years ago by ApolIllo

So what did you find out? Does DHL deliver to DPRK?

2 years ago by mrtksn

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

2 years ago by lopis

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...

2 years ago by diss

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.

2 years ago by 0x49d1

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.

2 years ago by infofarmer

Same here, Iā€™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, itā€™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.

2 years ago by knuthsat

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.

2 years ago by exikyut

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.

2 years ago by Matheus28

A LOT of abuse come from datacenter IP ranges. Most sites find it easier to just blacklist them all.

2 years ago by 1_player

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.

2 years ago by curvilinear_m

> 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.

2 years ago by notsureaboutpg

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.

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