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.
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.
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
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.
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.
@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
@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
"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.
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.
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
Used Brave for a bit during August and liked it (mainly their Discussions feature) but stopped using it since I always liked Startpage. I see a few mentions of Mojeek here, so I'll give it a shot
We're always on the lookout for feedback so if you use us again or are willing to send in the searches then it really helps us improve, the Eval Page is also worth mentioning for sending us these in a more interactive way. There's a new testing algo up there currently.
Long time FF user, new Brave user. Turning off all the bloat in Brave makes it basically Chromium. Reason I'm switching is like FF, Brave has a self-hosted sync, however unlike Firefox, Brave has a tabbed user experience on Android tablets. If FF had that, I would not be switching.
Same here, I mostly use brave search with occasional !ecos. Although, both companies have made questionable stuff in their browsers (ddg -- not blocking m$ trackers, brave -- similar stuff with trackers, don't remember which, plus the whole affiliate link debacle).