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by AlotOfReading 1050 days ago
I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations. I've been using Brave as a default for 1y+ and I still get consistently bad results compared to Google. The only reason it's remotely competitive is how much Google itself has declined in quality.

A recent example from my search history, "doors of stone release date". The author has announced a new novella releasing Nov. 2023, but not the actual book Doors of Stone. The google infobox gets this wrong, but the first result is correct. Brave accidentally gets it right that there's no release date for the book, but misses the novella announcement and all but one of the results are blogspam.
2 comments
ignitionmonkey 1050 days ago
>I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations.

The difference might be that they (including myself) don't ask search engines for facts like "doors of stone release date". They'll search for "doors of stone", find personally reliable sources like Wikipedia, Fandom, Goodreads, browse them and decide on an answer. When sources fail to appear, they'll either refine the search (like "doors of stone rothfuss") or call it a failure and maybe try a different search engine.

This is one the reasons why Brave has been good for me so far. When a relevant Wikipedia article exists, it shows it, even if the title doesn't match. Whereas lately DDG and others don't. In fact, you can see this with "doors of stone". Brave shows "The Kingkiller Chronicle", DDG doesn't at all, Google has it low down in the results.

It also shows Reddit discussions without needing to explicitly filter for it. And I use ad block to remove the AI summariser that takes up half the screen, it's not what I want from a search engine.

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Given_47 1050 days ago
Yea I do enjoy that new(ish) discussions section feature. Anecdotally have found those to return more relevant results than the old site:reddit.com in google
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Ycdr4thfdd 1050 days ago
The brave results are usually relevant for me, but I find it struggles when I'm looking for something very specific. Their indexing of reddit seems to have a lot of gaps when compared with Google.
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mox1 1050 days ago
Overall Brave search has been good for me. I have been using it as the default on every PC / Browser I utilize.

I will say there are times when it just falls flat. Like I will search for a brand or specific thing , expecting to get to the home / login page for that brand, and it just flat out gives me weird results.

But when I put the !g in front of the query, the first result is always what I wanted.

On the other than, when doing more general searches, Brave is on par or better than google.

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Eisenstein 1050 days ago
> I will say there are times when it just falls flat. Like I will search for a brand or specific thing , expecting to get to the home / login page for that brand, and it just flat out gives me weird results.

Conjecture: that might have to do with filtering SEO'd results. It is probably difficult to get rid of the pages that are meant to look a whole like the legit brand pages but not get rid the brand page itself.

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