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.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • XTL@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Vej@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Ad Nauseum is absolutely amazing. Google even admits that by banning it from Chrome.

  • Nia [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    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

  • L3ft_F13ld!@links.hackliberty.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • SterbenDeathGun@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      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. 🤙

  • macallik@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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

  • abcxyz@mastodon.social
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    1 year ago

    @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

      • abcxyz@mastodon.social
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        1 year ago

        @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

        • Katlah@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • abcxyz@mastodon.social
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            1 year ago

            @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

  • janAkali@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “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.

  • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • glowie@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Gargari@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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