Tag Archive for ‘Brave Search’

From Brave’s weblog:

The new Rerank feature introduces a panel on the search results page to give individual users more control over the presence and ranking order of the websites they see in Brave Search. The panel lists domains, each with the option to thumbs up (raise) or thumbs down (discard) the domains from the results. From that point forward, raised domains will be boosted higher up in the rankings a user sees, while discarded domains will no longer be included among the results. A domain’s up-rank or down-rank can be adjusted or undone at any time.

I’m a little late to this news, but this seems like such a neat feature. I wish it wasn’t hidden behind a menu, though. I wonder if they’ll eventually put the thumbs up and down buttons right in line with search results.

➝ Source: brave.com

Brave:

After several months of development, Brave Search is releasing its own privacy-preserving image and video search that is independent from Big Tech search engines. Users will no longer need to leave Brave Search for image and video search results. Now any Brave Search query can be served directly from Brave’s own index, enabling users to benefit from a fully independent search engine that protects their privacy and is censorship-resistant. 

Brave’s search results are getting quite good and the addition of image and video makes it even more appealing.

I’m not ready to give up on SearXNG quite yet, but I can imagine moving to Brave in the future if only because I’d no longer have the responsibility of maintaining the SearXNG service.

I wish I could tell all of my friends and family to switch to Brave Search, but most of them use Safari and Apple hasn’t added Brave as a search engine option. Hopefully the folks at Brave will be able to convince Apple to remedy that soon.

➝ Source: brave.com

Brave:

Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index. We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results.

Now they just need to convince Apple to offer it as a default search option in Safari so I can start hounding my friends and family to switch.

➝ Source: brave.com

From Brave’s announcement:

We’re excited to announce the long-awaited beta release of an innovative new Brave Search feature: Goggles. Goggles will enable anyone, or any community of people, to create sets of rules and filters to constrain the searchable space and / or alter the ordering of search results. Anyone could then choose to apply a Goggle—or extend it—to their view of Brave Search results. Essentially, Goggles will act as a re-ranking option on top of the Brave Search index.

This sounds pretty cool.

➝ Source: brave.com

Tom Parker, writing for Reclaim the Net:

The founder of DuckDuckGo, a Google-alternative search engine that has touted its “unbiased” search results for years, has announced that it has started down-ranking sites based on whether they’re deemed to be associated with Russian disinformation.

This piece does a pretty good job of pointing out the concern with this change where most others have missed the point. We want search engines to rank results based on relevancy and that can be determined by numerous factors. That’s literally what search engines do. But they’re making a determination as to whether or not a piece of content is “disinformation” and then down-ranking content based on that. That’s an editorial decision.

And what if they’re wrong? What if they down-rank content that is later found to be true? What if someone is specifically looking for “disinformation” content for research purposes — to see what the opposing perspective has to say in order to better form their opinions or to point at the absurdity?

While this certainly isn’t the end of DuckDuckGo, I wouldn’t consider it to be a positive change. It’s one of the reasons (along with privacy concerns and a dislike of centralization of power/influence) that I moved away from Google so many years ago. I would prefer to make my own decisions on these types of matters.

I don’t use DuckDuckGo directly anymore, that changed last year when I started self-hosting SearX. But I still use DuckDuckGo as one of the search engines powering SearX’s results. I don’t expect this news will change that because the results I get are still much better with DuckDuckGo included than without them.

I still have my eye on Brave Search, though. 92% of their results across all users comes from their own index and they don’t filter results for editorial reasons. I’m not sure if I’m ready to switch to them, but I like a lot of what they’re doing in this space.

➝ Source: reclaimthenet.org

From Brave’s Weblog:

Starting today, new Brave users will have the search functionality in the Brave browser powered by Brave Search, giving them the privacy and independence of a search/browser alternative to Big Tech. Brave Search is built on top of an independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks. Privacy-preserving Brave Search now replaces Google as the default search engine used in the address bar for new Brave users in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom; Brave Search as default also replaces Qwant in France, and DuckDuckGo in Germany, with more geographies to be added in the next several months. Existing Brave users will keep their chosen search engine default, and can set Brave Search as the default search engine in Brave or most other major browsers.

I don’t use Brave as my default browser or search engine, but I’ve been keeping my eye on both. And although I’m unconvinced that their cryptocurrency features are much more than a gimmick, I really appreciate that they’re avoiding reliance on Google for funding.

Looking at Firefox, which peaked at around 30% market share 10–15 years ago, the biggest mistake they’ve made was to put themselves in a position where Google was their primary source of income. And now they’re primary source of income is also their biggest competitor, which just sounds like a terrible place to be without ever looking at any of the financials.

Brave is building for the future and, if they keep it up, I don’t think it’ll be too long before many of us switch our default again.

➝ Source: brave.com

From Brave’s weblog:

Starting today, online users have a new independent option for search which gives them unmatched privacy. Whether they are already Brave browser users, looking to expand their online privacy protection with the all-in-one, integrated Brave Search in the Brave browser, or users of other browsers looking for the best-in-breed privacy-preserving search engine, they can all use the newly released Brave Search beta that puts users first, and fully in control of their online experience. Brave Search is built on top of a completely independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks.

It seems like a competent search engine, but I’ve been using SearX lately — a self-hosted meta search engine — and haven’t found many reasons to look elsewhere.

➝ Source: brave.com