• Cris@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products… :(

    It’d be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I’d love an open and private search engine that isn’t just a meta search :(

    Edit:

    Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren’t just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you’re looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites

    Yep doesn’t come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)

    Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn’t seem have any kind of summary or answers function.

    I think I’ll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I’m having a hard time finding something.

    • ExFed@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.

      Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.

        • Gordon_Freeman@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          They sold data to Microsoft, iirc, but that was the Android browser, not the search engine (something people forget to mention)

      • DeflectedBullhorn@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.

        Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.

      • Cris@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I’d much prefer to support something independent if I can

        Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren’t great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people’s search results, but instead they’re taking other people’s web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little… Lacking :(