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by allyourhorses 1829 days ago
Based on the principles in the blog post alone ( https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ ), this will obviously be my new default search until it's proven sufficiently unusable.

DDG's usability has always been a bit of a problem for me, it feels more like a perl wrapper over some search bookmarks than an engine in its own right. Will give this one a go for a while, there is literally every reason to try and few reasons not to.

edit: holy crap Brave, c'mon, 13 CSS files and 15 JS files for the search result page? Cold cache case absolutely matters when you're trying to grow, sort it out!

3 comments

I used brave search over the last week or so. It worked well for me, with less failed searches than on DDG, which sadly often does not work for me for more local queries. It did not feel unusable at all.

Note that I already liked cliqz before (properly evaluating how good a search engine is is hard, so that might have introduced bias).

I going to try it, too, but I'm concerned that I only get 1 page of search results regardless of the search term. Weird.
People rarely venture beyond the first page of results. That being said, we've filed an issue to consider adding additional pages of results too. Thank you for the feedback!
> Fully private. No profiles.

> Brave Search doesn't track you or your queries. Ever. It's impossible for us to share, sell, or lose your data, because we don't collect it in the first place

So eh, Brave's search is actually running through Amazon CloudFront load balancers. This wasn't quite my first idea of privacy. At the very least, it means searches are likely being logged at least once, and stored using some policies set by Amazon, not Brave

Some pretty curious internal API here: https://search.brave.com/api/state/independence , found in the copious amounts of duplicate JS on the page

That JSON endpoint for Independence metrics is what feeds the Independence Score on Brave Search. Click on the to view your own score (provided you have performed a sufficient number of searches). Current global score is 87% at the time of this writing. More information at https://search.brave.com/help/independence.