Moved from DDG to Brave Search about 6 months ago and haven't missed DDG at all. I can still use the !bangs I was accustomed to.
Given that Brave uses its own search index, and only a few times do I need to fall back to Google, it feels good to have a measure of independence from the Google/Bing dominance in search
Did not know that. I immediately grabbed some recent "poor result" Google searches from history and tried them at search.brave.com — so far ALL results are better. Reminds me a bit of Google from ten years ago.
Google's decline into its present inability to NOT show only "assumed popular content" created a huge time sink in my life that wasn't there before. Not a fan of the over- and inaccurate use of "disruption" but it was a legitimate description for what Google did to other search engines, and this feels like a similar level of improvement. I'm frankly amazed at how good the search results are in my initial test.
> I immediately grabbed some recent "poor result" Google searches from history
Did you revisit every query from your recent Google searches (or) Is it that you have a good memory that you were able to remember poor results from looking at the query?
I'm asking this because, I've been contemplating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] where people can submit their poor search results for the engines to make actionable changes towards improving them.
I re-opened several Google SERPs from my history and compared to Brave.
I often find NO results relevant to my query on the first three pages of search Google results, often seemingly because there is a "more common/popular" aspect of the topic I am searching about, and everything is about the common and related aspects and none about my use case.
Would you be willing to submit your bad search results to such forum? I welcome you to post your bad search results with the queries to that needgap thread for the time being unless there's a dedicated forum for that.
Brave automatically changed my default search engine on private tabs to their search. I don't know if it was a bug or feature, but this kind of behaviour keeps me wary from committing.
Given that Brave uses its own search index, and only a few times do I need to fall back to Google, it feels good to have a measure of independence from the Google/Bing dominance in search