Hello, how are you guys?
As the title says, what search Ingine are you currently using? I used DuckDuckGo for years, and just recently switched to Brave.
Also, what do you think about the Brave Browser? I have been using FireFox since forever.
Thank you for reading.
Personally I am not a fan of brave. Between running their own crypto currency, inserting affiliate links to pages and an advert revenue share. It seems like they are trying to be a middleman to your web experience.
I have been a Firefox user since 2004ish and mainly runAdnausem and consent-o-matic to keep my web experience as clean as possible.
It is always funny to look into my Adnausem ad vault to see what people are trying to advertise to me.
Brave is a series scammer and every few days somebody seems to be posting about it on Lemmy. It’s really looking like an ad campaign.
Ad Nauseum is absolutely amazing. Google even admits that by banning it from Chrome.
It directly breaks their TOS and revenue streams. No shock of they banned it.
Using privacy and Brave in the same sentence is a quite a leap.
I just realized it 😂
Brave is an ad company. Don’t use Brave.
For the record, I use SearXNG with Librewolf
I am so curious about LibreWolf. I am gonna try it soon on my daily laptop (Linux of course 😂).
I’ve been using it for a long time, I haven’t run into any issues with it.
First, to answer the main question of the post, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on and off, switching between it and Mojeek ultimately wanting to use Mojeek as my primary search engine once it improves a bit.
Before using any Brave product I highly recommend people read up on the CEO, especially the “Appointment to CEO and resignation” section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich TL;DR:
spoiler
donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California.
donations in the amount of $2,100 to Proposition 8 supporter Tom McClintock between 2008 and 2010.
On March 26, 2014, Eich expressed “sorrow for causing pain” and pledged to “work with LGBT communities and allies” at Mozilla.
After 11 days as CEO, Eich resigned on April 3, 2014, and left Mozilla over his opposition to same-sex marriage.
Aside from that, I don’t trust anything Brave due to their affiliate link controversy they had, I do not trust they won’t “accidentally” do something similar with their search engine. No software or CEO is without their fair share of controversy, but I feel it’s best to at least know what they are.
As for DuckDuckGo, their CEO Gabriel Weinburg’s primary buried controversy is the Names Database
Brendan Eich was also spewing misinformation on Covid-19 during the pandemic https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html
Here’s an archive link for it since nytimes sometimes throws a paywall https://web.archive.org/web/20231009104631/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html
That’s so bad.
The important stuff for privacy is his stance on “accidentally” injecting Brave crypto referral links into user sessions and defending it as a way to make money because he got Mozilla to use Google for cash. Eich will sell your data when he decides it’s the best way for Eich to make money. I got into a Twitter slap fight with him around then about the incongruity of his desire to track and sell users. He doesn’t care. Brave also has VC funding from non-privacy actors which means it’s only a matter of time before everything is monetized. Brave’s layoffs come as Brave is working on monetizing everything its free users do.
Same here. Mojeek is getting better, ddg because I seem to find what I need with it.
More people should give Mojeek a shot and maybe even join their forum so you can propose ideas for improvement.
I will use Firefox until the day it completely stops existing. You can pry it from my cold, dead hands. In regards to search engines, I’m using Startpage these days. I am actively looking around for something else that is free as in beer, useful, and reliable. I want to set and forget it, not constantly manage it because the instance I use is down or something.
presearch 👍
I’ll check that out thanks.
Whoogle. Try one of the public instances. They can be rate limited but not so often.
Nice. I’ll have a look.
I didn’t like the rate limits on public instances and I am self hosting my own for me and my family. But maybe everything will be fine for you :)
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I did a quick search, but I didn’t find any comparison between the two, so I just asked about it.
A lot of information came out, and I reckon this thread can help someone else down the line.
Thanks for the comment though. 🤙
I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be passive aggressive when people only want to learn. Hope you got a good answer from this thread.
Tried Brave Search and felt like it was the closest to Google Search, in terms of a modernized-feel and good UI/UX, but after reading about the company and their questionable ethics, I switched to DDG instead. I’ll sacrifice my experience to avoid the more suspect company
Yes, mate. Same for me. DDG has been around for longer.
@Sterben tho this post might not be doing so but still dont get why people like to compare and pick only 1 search engine to use forever
Just use all of them. Try all. Everyone has unique needs
Each company has differences in indexing. Tho the duck is Bing based, it chose to block “russian propaganda”. For something as vast as the net, using 1 engine is like using only 1 eye to see the world
For a truly open perspective, use multiple! Only for convenience’s of daily searches, maybe pick one
Just use all of them.
so what you’re saying is use SearXNG
@eya Kind of. But all engines have their own unique features too
Google/Startpage has quick snippets
Brave has Toggles. Duckduckgo has bangs
Baidu/Yandex/Naver has immense localisation
Bing has OpenAI
Under competition, companies will innovate. Thats what this is. Forcing Google to innovate
For that we’ve to support them all. meta engines are good for what they are. But it cant have those extra features. Search isnt only about the results. Like how YouTube isnt *just* about the video
Google doesn’t need to innovate when they have almost a 65% market share. They could implement malware into the browser and people would still use it.
@eya exactly but they werent always like that.
Google’s like Microsoft now. The very company they destroyed both in so many key markets. They were innovative.
Its the 97% search share and 70% Browser share thats the problem.
How Google, an AI company for over a decade, got so shock by newcomer OpenAI? Out of box thinking. What google itself used to be about
Thats what we need. Competition. Not anti trust trials or regulations. But prodcuts like chatgpt & Brave to make big companies innovate
Actually, You are right. I am gonna do like you said. Cheers.
I’m using metager.org, because I won’t trust a closed-source service like DDG or profit-driven company like Brave to not censor their search results.
“Yes, a security researcher revealed this week that even DuckDuckGo, which markets itself as “the internet privacy company,” made an exception for its business partner Microsoft to its browser’s blocking of some advertising trackers on websites, sparking accusations of betraying its purported privacy ethos.”
No offense but I am not sure why people trust duckduckgo or brave. Brave for the obvious concerns with controversy surrounding their CEO. And duckduckgo for essentially being diet bing.
It’s worth noting that DDG did update their policy after the blowback.
Now I remember why I started using DDG, they are as transparent as they can be as a search engine. Thanks for sharing these useful links.
And the Duck also has a sketchy CEO
Brave is not a bad browser, but it uses Chromium under the hood. That is bad, because it supports Google’s monopoly on browser rendering engines. You can either stick to Firefox, or check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox but with uBlock Origin preinstalled and all the privacy features already enabled and configured.
Brave is absolutely a bad browser. Brave is still very much spyware, but you can’t mitigate it like you can with Firefox. Brave is an advertisement company, and has been in multiple controversies such as injecting affiliate codes into links. There is zero reason to use Brave.
I would call it spyware, but I also wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. As I mentioned, my favorite browser is LibreWolf and that’s what I would suggest using to people.
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Hey, thank you for the answer. Yes, I just switched back to FireFox. I am gonna try LibreWolf on my Linux Laptop though.
OP was asking about Brave’s search engine here, not the browser.
They later specifically asked about the Brave browser.
Also, what do you think about the Brave Browser?
I’d recommend a searxng instance.
I must give props to Brave Search for its AI summarizer, which suprisingly does a pretty good job at using high quality sources from its index to give you a brief synopsis of the query.
True, I honestly like that too.
DDG uses bing and they filter results based on their biased opinion. Just give me results let me care about the rest! Brave has a limited index, plus not a huge fan of their crypto scam. StartPage gets results from Google and seems better than the above two. But Google itself filters results so not great. tbh, to get unfiltered great results try Yandex, they do have good index and seem no or less filtering. It would be great if SearX would provide a wrapper around Yandex, but AFAIK Yandex blocks bots and non-human interactions and it is hard to add SearX support. Kagi - I don’t want an extra subscription.
For now, I think SearX/Whooper instances are good enough
I’d never get into the Brave ecosystem. Have been trialing Kagi, it’s been doing on par with Google thus far but I haven’t trialed it hard.
Kagi isn’t FOSS or privacy focused
