Although I hate the Brave browser, the search engine is the most useful of the others. It gives me the most correct results compared to the others, even it sometimes ignores the quality resources.
I wonder your opinion about the search engine. Do you have any negative ones?
The AI (Leo) always gives me what I'm looking for, no matter how obscure my inquiries get, and handles all of my programming questions exceptionally well. I still have to go to Google when searching for images, but I believe in Brave and our searches will help to build it. Plus, it has an onion site, for secure searches while using the Tor Browser. In general I love Brave's support for Tor. If you'd like me to link the onion site, let me know.
For images I use Startpage, sane result as with Google, but without it's tracking and logging. For al other the best results give me Andisearch, which is apart one of the most private search out there.
I am a fan of Startpage as well! They also have an onion site. Anytime I see that, it is a green flag to me considering there's an inherent favoring for anonymity. With that, I know your recommendations are reliable and I'll put Andi to the test. Everybody says they have the best AI, so the only way to find out is with testing. I do need to stop using Google...
It's fine. Not a fan of the AI garbage generator at the top. For obscure queries Big G still returns the best results and this will not change any time soon.
Something else that won't change: If you're not paying for a service, then that service will be trying to monetize you in some other way and will therefore have an incentive to spy on you.
I use brave as default search on Firefox, and search in incognito by default. On mobile, brave doesn't save the "disable AI" setting so the slop is there for every search, not to mention slowing down the process.
By default it enables sending usage metrics and local search results which they claim to be anonymous.
Also unlike other search engines it doesn't have parameters for search query which can be used set your preferences, thus avoiding hustle to configure settings everytime.(in cases like delete cookies when browser closed and incognito mode).
I really want to switch to brave's search engine from ddg (mainly cuz brave has its own index while ddg uses Bing's). But I have a rlly nice theme on ddg, which makes me feel rlly comfortable. Sure, I can put up user themes/ user scripts whatever for brave search too, but I'm not getting the time to do all that.
I use it regularly because it is so far the best free privacy respecting search. But holy shit the lack of features (can't even do boolean search) is insane
Can you use the brave search engine from other browsers? (Is it a proxy for any other search engine?)
I'm expecting a negative, but a fella can dream.
Full disclosure: currently using StartPage and reasonably happy. StartPage is a proxy for Google as far as I can tell, although I've seen people say (on Reddit) it refers to Bing too.
You can. For instance, look up the Brave Search extension on Firefox. Or you can just set the brave.search link to your home page button on any browser.