I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?

If you’d not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why? I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I’m not into self hosting.

  • glacier@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    191·
    1 year ago

    trustworthy

    They are recommended on privacy guides: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#brave-search I generally trust privacy guides, although I don’t use Brave Search.

    CEO

    Their CEO is anti-vax and homophobic. Brave Browser (not search) has had some controversy around including crypto, replacing ads with their own, and having had inserted affiliate links into the URL bar in the past.

    censor stuff

    Hard to say, the job of a search engine is to show you what you want to find.

    data collection

    There is telemetry that can be turned off.

  • raptir@lemdro.idEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    It may help to understand what problem you are trying to solve by moving away from DDG.

    • utopia_dig@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now. Before that I used Brave Search. With Brave search I had to use the g! bang every few searches. Now with Kagi I have maybe used it five times in total. It has so much better search results!

    • hertg@infosec.pub
      2·
      1 year ago

      Have also been using it for a while now, it’s the best alternative I tried so far. downsides are cost, closed-source, and my fear that they’re gonna take VC money in the future. So far, I can stand behind their offering tho. And the built-in feature to lower or raise results from certain pages is amazing.

      • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
        23·
        1 year ago

        Source is the same level of reliability as brave saying it is trustworthy.

        The source is “trust me bro”

        Which means: no, it is not trustworthy. Hence my “no”

    • 4anon@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 year ago

      Wow, I had no idea this existed, it’s actually really well done. I’ve been using an onion searx instance for quite a lot now, I don’t really have any problems with it (other than the times it doesn’t work), but I will still add this to my list. You wrote in the about page that you dislike searx, why is that?

  • miah@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Ive been enjoying the results I get through qwant.com searches; its not perfect but feels more like older Google (before enshittification)

    • Dsklnsadog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the suggestion. I’m using startpage.com and I’m kind of trying to leave the Google influence but not at the cost of efficency.

      I hate so far the results provided by brave, ddg, and ecosia.

      But this one… It looks promising.

      • owlinsight@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        I stopped using Startpage because they regularly limits service access to IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor and it was immensely annoying having to prove that I’m a human each time I searched for anything.

        Have you also heard of SearXNG?

        I’d be also curious to know what annoyed you about DDG or Brave search.

        • Dsklnsadog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yes, I’m familiar with SearXNG, but every time I tried searching for something complex on different instances, I would encounter the following error: “Sorry! we didn’t find any results. Please use another query or search in more categories.” I genuinely appreciate what they’re trying to accomplish with that project, but I’m not in a position to test something if it doesn’t demonstrate the same efficiency as a established product. Let’s say I can’t afford to be a beta tester right now.

          To a lesser extent, I had a similar experience with Brave, as its results align more with what I expect from Google (and therefore, StartPage).

          DuckDuckGo, when I tried using it as an alternative, never provided me with better results than what StartPage offered. I’d love for it to work for me, but I simply end up spending more time there than on other search engines.

    • Mikelius@beehaw.org
      0·
      1 year ago

      Just gave it a try… Doesn’t appear to work for browser default search settings? I do a search and see results for about 2 seconds before it then shows their search page. I used https://www.qwant.com?q=%s for the query. Liked the search results I tested it with but not being able to use the search bar for quick searches is a deal breaker for me :(

  • trippingonthewire@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Brave is alright for normies and maybe as a secondary browser.

    I’d try a SearX instance or SearX.be and use FireFox or Librewolf as a browser, at least as a primary way to look things up.