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
    54·
    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.

    • Thom Gray@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      If I try to stop using every company or service that has an obnoxious CEO spouting ignorant views I’m afraid I wouldn’t even be able to access the web. At the very least I’m glad companies like Brave give lip service to privacy to highlight awareness.

      • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
        11·
        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”

  • raptir@lemdro.idEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

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

    • hertg@infosec.pub
      5·
      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.

    • utopia_dig@lemmy.ml
      3·
      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!

    • Linus_Torvalds@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Same here. The devs are super responsive to the community and actually care about privacy. The heated discussion on whether to include a suicide warning with certain searches is a banger read.

  • miah@kbin.social
    9·
    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
      3·
      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
        2·
        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.

          • BuckShot@beehaw.org
            3·
            1 year ago

            A trick I’ve learned for when this happens with SearXNG is to add “!web” to the search query. It provides a wider range of search engines and images, which specific ones can be selected in the settings. Like all things software, it takes a bit to adjust to a new interface but SearXNG allows users to control a lot more of the functionality.

  • trippingonthewire@lemmy.ml
    3·
    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.

  • Gamey@feddit.rocks
    2·
    1 year ago

    It’s a really good search engine and I have no reason to doubt their claims about privacy and cencorship but I have to say no there because beside finding piratebay in the normal search results it’s all just their claims and I don’t know of any sientific study or similar that ever tested any of the claims. If you don’t trust those promises self hosting SearX is probably a good option and I haven’t tried it in years but Qwant is another one with their own index aka independent results.