this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Privacy

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Is Brave Search trustworthy? (feddit.de)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I can recommend Kagi. Happy customer for over a year.

Some reading to get started:

[–] [email protected] 5 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Brave is one of the more privacy-centric search engines. I don't think it is the best on privacy, but it is pretty good.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Source? Your ass?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I moved away from Brave Search when they went 2+ months only offering Google or Bing for their image searches. I can strongly recommend digging into https://search.disroot.org though!

[–] odium 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is that different from other public searxng instances?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It could just be me, but I dig disroots outlook. They're a privacy-focused platform ran by volunteers in it for what seems to be all the right reasons. While on the other hand, I can't tell you much about the other public SearXNG instance options.

[–] asmodeus 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can use brave search anonymously through 4get.ca if you don't trust them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

no search engine is 100% trustworthy, unless self hosted (even then im not sure)...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Metager.org could also be a good daily drive

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No. Use Qwant instead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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 :(

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nah same results :( maybe Firefox nightly mobile problem?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Must be. I had difficulties with it at one point, and I ended up living at the URL from some search results and was able to figure out what it wanted. I thought the missing slash might have been your issue.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Hey does anyone know if Ungoogled Chromium has WEI implemented ?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I use a lot of search engines, none of these are Google, Bing or Brave. I use mainly Andisearch as primary search and Mojeek as second (both are between the most privacy protecting search engines out there). Apart some others (Qwant, DDG, Startpage, MetaGer, and some specific ones for news, images, resources, Url Checks, etc. and interns from social networks)

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

Good search engine with no ads.