I’ve been using Brave search for several months now. I switched the day that it was announced. The quality is fairly good, but I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little as it indexes more widely or something. At first I was impressed with how little spam ended up in top results, but lately exact queries for Python functions or prominent API functions have lots of spammy content above the actual documentation. Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc.
I’m still rooting for them, but in general
I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results on Google, DDG and now Brave. I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).
> I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).
The irony is that Google wants all our information "to improve our user experience", except they don't want our ban lists.
This is an exciting idea, but the style of the paper is off-putting. It's written in the style of an academic paper, while clearly eschewing associated norms like not giving blatant opinion or waxing philosophical.
"The rationale is not to customize the ranking according to the implicit interests of the user, but to offer a mechanism to define multiple rankings, plural, open and explicit, for only if it is so, can it be trusted."
Please put opinions in a blogpost and uphold the (reasonable) norms of the research community, for only if it is so, can your work be trusted.
It’s a bit ridiculous, really. I actually don’t feel the need to ban that many sites. I would probably be happy if I could just ban them. How can one site be so bad?
I don't actually want Google to index as much of the internet as it possibly can. I actually want streamlined indices that are tailored towards thoroughly searching a specific knowledge domain.
Edit: I would love, love, love a search engine specifically tailored towards programming questions. One that doesn't treat queries like "C# ?." as me looking for "C#" and getting the most generic results possible.
I just want a search engine that gives me AND, OR, and NOT qualifiers or something similar. Parens, too, if possible. Ideally, an sql interface, but that's probably pushing it :)
I had an idea for this where I was building a manually-constructed index of sites kind of like old-school Yahoo (related to typography), and then there would be a full-text search of those URLs and their close relatives (pretty much, the idea being that for a given URL, I'd index anything else in the same URL directory or subdirectories of that URL). I ended up giving up on it largely because time is finite and I have plenty of other projects competing for my time. I imagine something that built on the basic idea though could work, by omitting the Yahoo-style directory and instead working from a collection of vetted URL starting points.
If you have a (very) short list you can make/modify a search engine entry to add a -site:which.ever for each that cause problems. The problem is that the scummy sites are legion but the negate list / search term limit usually cannot handle many - I don't know what Brave's limits might be.
seriously, any Googlers around that are close enough to search to know why Pinterest is still dominating image results despite being incredibly low quality? this is a widely known problem.
We have had a few posts about this, a blog from an ex-employee explained it basically as Pintrest spending tens of millions to do everthing they can to game Google search results and they arn't going to stop any time soon. Pinterest just puts A LOT of time and money into SEO.
I guess that makes sense... but it seems like they should be manually penalized. They're single-handedly degrading the quality of the entire image search product.
Prior to the popularity of MDN and campaigns like W3Fools (q.v.), the articles on W3Schools were very bad from a web standards perspective (<marquee> and VBScript levels of bad); from a programming perspective, their PHP articles (which largely date from that time) are still incredibly shoddy. Their unwillingness to relinquish the unwarranted authoritative tone or at least visibly disavow any connection to the W3C (who asked repeatedly), coupled with their domination of search results, at a time of a standards push (remember validator buttons?) and multiple high-quality documentation efforts (later folded into MDN; Opera in particular had a good course) just plain got on people’s nerves.
They’re a valid reference, just a low-grade one, and using a low-grade reference is rarely a good tradeoff. They also used to be worse and never quite shook of their reputation.
For me the issue with all of these sites is that their primary innovation seems to be dominating search results, and everything else is an afterthought. I actually don't know very much about w3schools other than that I have to continually reach over them to get what I'm after.
All the various gif sites that make it nearly impossible to get an actual gif. Why the fuck are they showing up on image results if the thing they serve to actual humans is a video? I thought tricking the Google Bot was supposed to be bad for SEO, but I guess not.
I can’t remember if it was a former feature of Google search or a Chrome extension, but that capability used to be available in Chrome. w3schools was on that list, among other republishers and whatnot. Loved it. Maybe someone else can augment my hazy recollection.
Understandable since a few years later Google would acquire Doubleclick Inc, which back then was number one in polluting the web with advertising, and first entry in all adblockers kill lists.
I just found a timely example of one of these sites that republish GitHub issues as their own content. Trying to understand a fairly specific Tensorflow error. Pasted an exact phrase query and the top result is gitmemory dot com. The content is horribly formatted, obviously just a low-effort scrape job. The author is attributed, but the link links to another page on this site that even says it just pull the data straight from GitHub's API. The footer links to another website, uonfu dot com. It looks even worse, and doesn't even try to attribute the original author of the content.
> If you are wondering where the data of this site comes from, please visit https://api.github.com/users/.../events. GitMemory does not store any data, but only uses NGINX to cache data for a period of time. The idea behind GitMemory is simply to give users a better reading experience.
Yes, I hate it when I get results for that site. It also squeezes out the original github.com URL for that content from the search results, as you said, so I can't even solve it by writing an extension to hide it from search results.
On the other hand, I actually like the fact that such mirror sites exist, because they often have content that's disappeared from the original for whatever reason. The name GitMemory is itself suggestive of that.
Worst shitsite on the web. It contains nothing useful, original or unique. I'd like to know what's Google's excuse for blacklisting that domain into oblivion.
I have a greasemonkey script that blocks domains from being shown in GSE results. Works well, but I don't have it on all of my browsers.
I remember reading in HN an idea about allowing people to customize the weights used to filter search results - a search engine that provided that, where I could use some curated configuration file. Maybe I could have profiles like "cooking", "programming", "news" and help the search engine even better to understand my intent.
Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into google results, and allow me a quick access to that list to manage it afterwards - ALSO, allow me to add a comment to remind myself WHY I did not want to see it anymore.
This is where ad-based businesses show their ugly side: The more control you have over what you see, the fewer ways they have to slip you inconspicuous ads.
This is why all content feeds like Facebook and Twitter get vaguer as time goes by, and it's why Google will never give up control over results unless it legally has to.
Yeah. The dependency to adds, are a big reason why so much tech suck so much, despite trillions invested.
Because those investments are not made, to show you clearly what you want to see, but to show you just enough, to not loose you while injection as much information garbage as possible.
If we do not fix that, it will all just get worse, not better.
It's also why every social network moved to an algorithmic feed. Had it remained chronological, our primitive brains would have noticed content from yesterday come up after a certain point, signaling to us that we are caught up and don't need to scroll further.
Can't imagine how catastrophic that would be to their ad business.
G*d forbid anyone ever stop scrolling. I was browsing airbnb the other day, looking at places in a small area (maybe 25 rentals) and was shocked/alarmed/saddened to discover that the app has infinite scrolling. Rather than the list ending once I’ve seen all 25 results, they just show them again in a different order.
Not to mention the fact they police content. They'll refuse to associate with anyone they deem objectionable enough for any reason. This will deny sites their revenue and will lead to self-censorship to regain their favor. Nothing kills perfectly good websites faster than some offended person complaining and ads getting pulled.
If you control what articles and pages show up based on some searches you can impact elections. Forget ads, who would give up control every close election on the planet?
There's a Chromium extension, uBlacklist, that does something similar. You can blacklist sites from search results and also whitelist so those are highlighted.
Excellent! I was looking for precisely this. Next, I would also very much like to weed out image/video/map suggestions, related searches, people also ask and page snippets. The cognitive overload from navigating these giant banners and getting to my search results is getting worse by the day.
But, how stable is this? I tried so hard doing this with greasemonkey. But google's DOM is ridiculously obfuscated and kept breaking frequently. So much for the semantic web, heh?
This is actually doable. There's a tweak to PageRank you can do (that's as old as the original paper[1]) that allows you to bias the ranking toward a certain set of websites. It works really well.
While it's probably unfeasible (or at least really expensive) to do completely personalized rankings, that's just too much data, but segmenting off into areas like academia, blogosphere, tech, etc. is quite doable, and as the authors remark, this approach is highly resilient to manipulation from commercial interests.
Neeva has been pretty good in my experience, but the lack of ability to make it the default search engine in Safari (macOS and iOS) is what prevents me from using it 100%.
That's obviously not at all a knock against Neeva. Safari needs to allow more flexibility in its search engine defaults. I've filed multiple radars/requests to Apple to make this setting more flexible and/or provide Neeva as an option.
I think neeva is interesting. Once payment and a login is required it changes the incentives and opens up new feature possibilities. One cool feature is linking your private cloud document storage making search very personal.
It remains to be seen if they can get enough people to pay in order to keep going though.
They won't let me try it because they "haven't launched in my region". Presumably that's because I'm in latin america, and they're conflating location and language.
I'm not sure how they actually do it, but it works pretty well. When I search for things I almost always find what I'm looking for. I use it both for tech and for personal stuff.
Yahoo had a system along time ago where you could slide results more toward shopping or more toward informational. Like most features like that, it didn't last very long.
Kagi Search already has customizable 'prefer' and 'mute' lists for domains, as well as customizable 'lenses' which are similar to goggles concept from Brave. (disclaimer: founder at Kagi)
I'm not even sure how much manually blocking domains would help remedy the problem with Google results, which is that so much of the top hits are copy-pasted blog spam with very little information, scrambled together (very possibly by a non-human) purely to game SEO.
It seems like it's gotten even worse just in the past few months. I'll try to Google something common, like "can you feed X to dogs" and all the results I find are these giant "articles" that aren't even about that specific thing. Instead it's a giant wall of text with commonly-Googled questions, and if you ctrl+F to the section you were looking for, the answer is usually horrible, and why should you be trusting information from this website anyway?
Then you go back and click through other results and find an entirely different website with all the exact same text on it.
Top recipe results are also all copy-pasted SEO spam surrounded by a wall of text about the history of the recipe, and how the author is a "country mom" (definitely not a man at a content farm in India), hiding the recipe deep within.
They must be pumping out all these fake dedicated websites at such a high rate that blocking domains won't get you anywhere.
What we do (at Kagi Search) to address this problem is use our own index which contains only non-commercial results from the web as well as forum discussions. Thinking behind is that the quality of the content is in inverse proportion to the number of ads/trackers/affiliate links on the site.
Our index is still in infancy but the example of it working for the query 'best laptop' can be seen in this screenshot:
> Thinking behind is that the quality of the content is in inverse proportion to the number of ads/trackers/affiliate links on the site.
search.marginalia.nu does this and for the stuff that it can find it works wonderfully.
Getting results on search.marginalia.nu is (borderline) delightful in the best cases. Last month I searched for something along the lines of "dual boot windows linux" and got 3 fantastic results among the top ten - and no blogspam.
If SEO specialists figure out and start to reduce ads, trackers and scripts generally I'll count that as a win too :-)
afaik, seo spammers are quite sophisticated in masking affiliate links and tracking codes with redirect chains and other techniques. Their general assumption is that google does exactly what you expect to do and downranks affiliate spam.
What are your thoughts on reputable news websites that have tons of ads and trackers because they have yet to figure out any other viable way to survive?
I think that 'reputable' and 'tons of ads and trackers' do not belong in the same sentence.
Ad-supported business models incentivize the creation of large quantities of content, because you need a lot of pageviews to earn a little bit of money with ads (since most people either ignore or block ads, if they manage to load the page to see them at all).
High quality journalism should have value that we are ready to pay for, like we did for hundreds of years. This concept is called the "newspaper".
You are expected to pay for high quality baker or a tailor, book, movie or music, why not for getting information that "only" has the power to shape societies? If I see information next to an ad, I personally tend not take it too seriously.
What is missing right now from a technology standpoint is an easy way to manage subscriptions, built into my browser as default. Expecting the user to create and manage a separate account/billing identity for every publisher is what is preventing this model to take off (IMO).
1) they ask for an unreasonable amount of money. If they could just charge what they'd otherwise earn from ad impressions on that particular page view, it would be fine.
2) there is no global, anonymous (from the website's perspective - I don't mind the payment processor keeping records for AML/KYC purposes) micropayments system, and card payment fees make micropayments unsustainable
3) subscribing to the website requires providing personal details, with no guarantee they won't be used for tracking/marketing/etc. Cancelling a subscription is also intentionally made difficult - see the New York Times.
4) all paywalls require subscriptions - there's no "pay per view" mechanism. Do they really expect every web user to have a subscription to dozens of different news websites? Unless you literally spend all day reading news, it's bad value for money.
Sure it would help. Adblockers have had custom filter lists for years. If all you need to do is upload a text file every once in a while, that would go a long way to improving search results in general.
I didn't click into the paper, but I see now it also mentions crowdsourced filters. That would be much more effective than everyone creating their own blocklists
I have personally found that when searching for developer documentation, as you mentioned, unfortunately nothing beats Google. I can always find what I’m looking for very quickly. But when I try DuckDuckGo, it’s a mess of irrelevant or weak pages.
I also noticed that, if DDG doesn't find it in my initial search, there's no way on earth I could game the search terms to actually find it. So if my first 1-2 searches give nothing I just add the !g...
Same thing with bing. It's a fine search engine for lots of things, but for searching documentation it's really weak, showing sites like w3schools and tutorialspoint far above the results I actually want.
It kind of makes sense that w3schools would spend much more time on the SEO game than docs.python.org, but it just drives me back to google
I noticed the exact same thing there. Usually, when I don't get results I just append !g after the search terms, and google yields much better results. But what I'm most bothered by DDG nowadays is that on my phone the first 2-3 results (which on a phone basically means the whole visible area) are quite frequently ads.
Some years ago Google had the option to remove a website from search results. After a few months they discontinued. It would be nice to know why, if the user adoption was too low, the computational cost too high, or the user experience too bad because users inadvertently removed good results.
Like most features that Google releases, I believe that they use them to train their algorithms and once they get enough human input on a feature from people using it, they remove the feature and turn it over to the machine. We see it on the SEO side all the time. Release a feature, call it a ranking factor, thousands of SEOs jump all over it. The algo learns and then the features importance is removed. NoFollow links are a great example of this.
How many google ads are on github or stack overflow compared to the other pages you find? They know exactly what every little change to the algorithm does to their bottom line.
Personal remove lists basically turn each query from each person with such a list into a completely distinct query, which breaks caching on multiple levels. If a few people are using such a feature or if people sometimes add a couple -sites to a query, no big deal, but if enough people used it with basically unique site lists, the performance degradation would probably make a rollback of the feature inevitable.
It was a tool to remove a site from your own results. If you searched and saw a site you didn't like, you could click to no longer get the results from that site. It wouldn't affect what anyone else saw anywhere.
Not a problem as long as it only affects the user themself?
My guess is some ux head exploded when they realized someone might blacklist a site they wanted. Or maybe the one who made it got promoted and no one stepped up to maintain it?
DDG is awful for spam on most searches which can't be easily resolved with a Wikipedia info box. The 3rd result onward is very fishy, content spammy results of very low quality. It's like their algo isn't good enough to separate the wheat from the chaff yet.
DDG can give downright weird and irrelevant results, and sometimes (rarely) even returning with "noting matched your search". I hate it, but I have to fall back to Google quite often, and the results are consistently better; sometimes much better.
I still have DDG as the default because it does work a lot of the time, and because it's easy to turn a search in to a Google search with !g, but I have to admit it's not all that good in comparison :-( To be honest I'm not sure if I would keep it as the default if it didn't have !g, and that's not a good look for DDG :-/
(I appreciate this is a very hard problem btw, so not even intended as a dig at DDG; just my experience with it)
I hear this criticism a lot and I always wonder whether that has something to do with either me not having a Google account and thus using the unpersonalized search, or simply with what I search for, but Google is almost always giving me worse results that DDG or, for that matter, any of the smaller competitors.
Google seems to be filled with sponsored results that are only superficially relevant, and from page 2 onwards, it sometimes feels like whatever it’s giving me isn’t related to my search at all. Even when I’m very specific with my query, using +/- and quoted phrases.
I'm never logged in to Google, and don't even store cookies by default (although that may or may not be enough to prevent all tracking/personalisation, it's more than "the average" user and does seem to keep the worst out, not that personalisation is necessarily bad; the singular reason I have an account is because I actually like YouTube personalisation – without it I just get idiotic nonsense on the frontpage and now I get stuff I actually want to watch, although the old YouTube model of good categories was still better, but ah well).
I wish I had taken some screenshots, here's the only recent one I have: https://i.imgur.com/b9hu2a9.png – I was trying to find about Cambodian date writing conventions for some i18n code, but all DDG gave me was spam (and most likely, scam) results. Probably not the best search term in the first place ("Cambodian calender" would be better), but it's a decent example.
I should keep a spreadsheet or something, but I'm too lazy for that. And it's not really all that interesting either.
Sure no Natural Intelligence nor an algorithm could've possibly guessed what you meant with 'date in Cambodia'. Reminds me of the time Blanche Deveraux remarked on the obvious nature of a book titled "Females to Fondle" only to find out it was a tome of the Encyclopedia.
Yes, my search terms weren't the best, and I did find what I wanted soon afterwards. However, just the inclusion of "dates" shouldn't bring up loads of spam (and most likely scam) sites.
(What I actually wanted to know is how widespread usage of the Khmer calendar is, and if I could get away with just supporting Gregorian).
Same for me... I think maybe part of it is that people have forgotten (or never knew) how to choose good search terms, and Google has worked hard on giving good-for-most-people or good-for-your-profile-bubble search results for terribly-constructed search terms, while the others haven't. I've long had the habit of constructing search terms that are minimal but distinct, since I had to do a lot of searching on less-DWIM systems like library catalogs and journal indices dating back to the 90s, and this seems to serve me well with searching DDG. I expect Google simply doesn't care about your actual search terms very much, and gives you stuff matching some kind of linguistic model of your search; what it thinks you want to search for, rather than what you ask for. That would account for it giving worse results on a well-constructed query.
Maan Leo is a Dutch author. DDG gives me a few bad results about Maan Leo, a few bullshit links about horoscopes ("Make a Leo man chase you"), and finally the Wikipedia page for Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
The Google search gives me results about, well, Maan Leo (in spite of using Indonesian search by the way – this GeoIP stuff Google does is so annoying). For this particular term, DDG is basically useless.
The Brave search results also seem a lot better by the way. Certainly loads better than DDG.
I have heard a few people say things like this, but I have been using ddg for years and I think I could count the number of times I got nothing back on the fingers of one hand, and those were times I was using incredibly specific search terms +"leprachaun eating marrow" +gif -funny or whatever (haven't tried that exact search but you get the idea).
Occasionally I try google search to check and I virtually never think google's results were better. But I'm guessing a lot of that is down to how you do search-fu, what you're actually looking for and subjective stuff about ranking quality.
Isn't that a bit by force of habit ? I used to fallback to the !g quite often. I hardly needed it in the last 2 or 3 years. And Google was consistently worse when I did. So, as you say, just my experience.
DDG also just uses the bing search API for all their results seemingly. They claim to use other sources as well, but in the tests I conducted building Kagi last year, it was always identical to bing. They must have a special deal with microsoft because the API fees at that volume are completely unsustainable, as in the operating costs are 5-10x the theoretical profits from advertising. If they were actually scraping, this wouldn't be a thing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...
Yeah, DDG is just privacy Chrome on top of bing. As far as I can tell they've made no efforts at building a proper scraper or index. If Microsoft gets tired of the deal there is no more DDG. Risky proposition.
I don't understand why search engines don't fight SEO spam using simple, hardcoded rules for specific keywords. Surely, something like "if the search string contains the word 'python', rank results from 'python.org' above everything else" can't be difficult to implement?
Granted, it's not a silver bullet for search engine spam in general, but even a few dozen rules like that would dramatically improve the quality of search results for a huge number of queries in practice.
I hate it to say it, but for CS beginners python.org isn't a good resource: it's simply too technical. Even for motivated students it will take them at least a few months of learning from a more beginner-friendly resource before the official docs on python.org make sense.
That's not to mention the multitude of other materials on python.org other than the docs, like PEPs, pypi (third party libraries), bug reports, etc. Can you imagine a student searching for how to use a Python feature, but found a PEP illustrating the design of that language feature?
"For security, it is best to manage Python within its own dedicated container. Live Python in an unmanaged environment is unwise and can lead to resource strangulation. When objects are consumed by Python, this will affect their lifespan."
I think you’re broadly talking about site authority which is something search engines absolutely do, I imagine it’s a non trivial thing to get right and the scope of doing it manually for every topic on the planet is probably not going to be easy.
Haven’t used Brave Search yet, but I have not had the same issue it’s DDG. I use it as my primary search and it works the large majority of the time. I do resort to Google on rare occasions and am always amazed by all the blatant spam at the top of its results.
(tangent) It's hard to think of a website that wouldn't benefit from ban lists of some kind. Twitter's muted words feature is the predominant feature keeping me on the site.
I wish something similar existed for this site, Reddit [1], even news sites like NYT (at some point I've listened to the POV of certain contrarian columnists and don't need to see their byline anymore).
[1] I know you can do this via Reddit Enhancement Suite but it would be much better as a native feature that worked across clients
Reddit is effectively used as a covert propaganda and advertising machine so its absolutely not in their interests to provide that functionality sadly.
Well, I'd bet a big factor is that these spammy sites probably spend a lot of time on SEO - illuminating StackOverflow answers and official documentation don't.
I guess I’m surprised that it’s not possible to quickly deindex these spam farms and render their SEO spend a waste. Especially Google, I’m surprised they can’t detect and ban SEO rings more effectively.
I am surprised by this as well since Google is able to identify the origin of content (eg. Stackoverflow) and penalize sites for duplicating that content (or so they say). In my opinion it wouldn’t be difficult to identify the domains duplicating the content and penalize heavily. But, those sites are most likely displaying Google Ads so…
I would assume this is easier if you are indexing more frequently and have been indexing for longer, and Google has more resources to allow them to crawl more often (another advantage to scale in search, which combined with other advantages of scale, is why Google has an effective monopoly IMO).
If you recently started crawling you won't be able to detect which content was 'first', and if you don't crawl as frequently as google you are reliant on your crawl frequency being quicker than the 'content stealing' speed.
I mean you need to crawl often enough that you can determine which site stole content.
If a full crawl of the web takes 3 months and A steals content from B after 2 weeks, it may not be possible to easily infer that A has stolen from B rather than visa-versa.
If I crawl every week and see that A posted it on the first crawl, and B suddenly also had that content on the second crawl, I can infer that B stole from A.
To be fair, w3schools and the like don't just copy content. They provide different information and, most importantly, present it differently from official docs. And for many, their way of presenting information may work better.
The W3schools hate is a bit outdated. Even W3Fools[1] eventually backtracked and acknowledged that W3Schools has continuously improved and updated their content.
But what will Google do if users end up banning the majority of websites with Google Ads and/or analytics?
The reason Google doesn't fight SEO spam (and just generally annoying/obnoxious behavior such as paywalls) more aggressively is because it doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds - all these spammy sites have ads or analytics that benefit Google.
Maybe the good folks at Apple, Mozilla, Brave or Opera could implement this feature in their browsers? They’re looking to increase their percent of browser use - it could encourage people to at least try switching over. Obviously would be popular among the HN crowd for developer documentation, but we could spread the news :)
On the downside I could see this being used by terrible people to delist actual information sources so that they would only ever be served conspiracy theory sites in their searches as well.
Google did it with a lot of health blog spam that had low quality and false info but a ton of referral links. It takes a lot of bad publicity for them to act, though.
True. If you search for any Python documentation the first links on Google are almost always geeksforgeeks, w3schools, etc instead of the official Python docs.
I think this is telling of how often the python docs actually solve peoples’ questions. For example, I searched “python string replace”, with the first 4 being tutorialpoint, w3schools, geeksforgeeks, stack overflow and at position 8 is the python docs.
The issue with the python docs for this search is that it takes me to “built-in types”, and starts off with things totally irrelevant to what I want. I now have to go searching for string, then find the built-in method replace. Meanwhile, the other tutorial-esque websites almost all show an example of str.replace above the fold. If you’re Google and you’re trying to get people information faster, you’re going to promote the result that has more people not coming back to the search result page afterwards because it was hard to find the answer on that result.
I think string replacement in Python is a particularly egregious example because strings are core language types. Library docs are a lot better organized and a lot more easily indexed. This is just a problem with Python's docs in general, imo.
You want Google to direct you to the correct anchor on the page. That makes sense, Google should do that. The docs shouldn't be broken out to 1 page per method because Google likes to link to the top of the page instead of the relevant anchor tag.
This is true, and if you want the docs you can always just add the word docs to your query. Expecting the search engine to always favor one thing seems like it'd work well in this case for some people, but in other cases might get mushy
I find this especially useful since I often otherwise find myself typing site:python.org (or similar things, like if I just want to see the MDN page instead of going through w3schools or blog posts for examples).
edit: in the particular example for str.replace, I found it buried in the results for "py replace", at the top of "py str.replace" (helps if you know what Python calls the type) and basically nowhere for "py string replace".
You should try adding "docs" to the query. "range python" shows w3schools at the top for me but "range python docs" shows docs.python.org first for me. Same for "html article tag" (w3schools) vs "html article tag docs" (MDN).
I filled in the beta signup form for Kagi search [0] the other day and one of the questions was along the lines of "What must-have feature do you need in a new search engine?", and my answer was the ability to blacklist these spam sites for the exact same reasons. The major search engines are becoming close to useless.
This used to be a built in feature. Being able to block ExpertsExchange from all searches was incredibly useful. Now I'd do the same for Pinterest, W3Schools and apidock.com
I wonder maybe every other day if I could delist W3Schools, by maybe always adding a negating query aspect to the URL. But this all doesn't seem easily supported, when I looked at it. Yep, hating on W3Schools with a passion. Younger self shot himself too often in foot with W3Schools.
Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant.
I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here?
The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years is because for a large segment of users it works.
And as someone else has pointed out the official documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online docs are close to worthless if you have a decent ide that shows you method signatures.
PHP docs used to be a lot better in that they described what was going on and why and had comment sections that I imagine they also used as feedback to improve the docs.
I haven't used PHP or Python for years but today there is Spring docs to drive me mad: telling me all the things I know and not telling me anything about how to interpret a Spring project.
Spring is infinitely flexible and there are more ways to configure Spring than there are Spring programmers since most of them can't even configure two projects the same way ;-)
Not in regards to W3Schools, but in regards to docs in general: i've found those of PHP to be excellent for one simple reason (regardless of what i think of the language).
They have user comments, which oftentimes contain the information and examples that are actually very important in day to day usage, as opposed to a cut and dry description by the language authors.
To me, it feels like most of the technologies out there could benefit from user source and user voted content at the bottom of pages like this, the one thing that IDEs also don't provide (though if one were to throw in some fuzzy search from, say, StackOverflow, we could probably get context surrounding a particular bit of code).
Of all the spammy sites, w3schools is the least of my problems. I still find a use out of it when I need some very superficial information about, say, an HTML tag.
My hate for W3Schools comes from the low quality of the content and the impression I get that their high ranking is only the result of SEO hacking. I respect the fact that there's a lot of _poor_ official documentation. But let's not supplant that with different _poor_ documentation.
I can't speak for Java's docs, but Python's have good examples in the documentation that are not present in an IDE's tooltips. Further, there's often a handy link to the source code of the module.
Thinking back, yes it is probably true what you write about Python docs, the problem is you easily end up in the wrong docs when searching for something.
I'm not sure why that's happening to you. Perhaps you're being misled by some SEO to click on pages that are sites trying to put advertisements in front of you?
I meant doing so without adding it to every search. But, hey, I clearly didn't have enough faith in humanity... not only am I now able to find some extensions to generally mess with my search queries, there's extensions freakin' DEDICATED to filtering out W3Schools!!!
>I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list
With Google, you can append -site:site1.com -site:site2.com to a query, though I don't know if it provides the same result as filtering them out after a query.
I doubt it would do much good to have a ban list. An entire industry is singularly focused on gaming search engines to promote whatever. It just so happens that blogspam sites are incredibly profitable in aggregate.
It still seems like such a simple technical problem to solve, albeit at large scale. Particular URL is blatant spam? Delist it. Keeps popping up on new URLs? Threaten to delist the hosting provider's address block. I'm more inclined to think that the reason these problems aren't solved is because there's little incentive to do it. The more time you spend milling around looking for what you're looking for, the more opportunities there are to show you ads.
Right, ad-driven search engines are fundamentally incentivized to provide results that are bad enough that you need to try harder to find your answer, but that are good enough for you not to switch (with a fairly high cognitive barrier to switching).
I would pay for a search engine that let me 1 click ban results from a given domain from showing up. I never want to see reddit, facebook, twitter or pinterest in my results.
> I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little
I've had the exact same experience and sharing the same doubts as well.
For programming related queries I'm going to Google 100% though, it understands the intent so much better. But for general queries I use Brave 90%+ of the time. But, it feels like I'm adding !g to the query more often than I used to in the beginning.
That's an interesting observation and one I think rings true even though I haven't really actively noticed it.
Stuff like tutorialspoint or w3schools is fine imo since they actually write their own content and add a but of beginner friendly explanation to it, but there's some blatant stack overflow copying that's been popping up.
At least they have the option to report bad search results so they might be able to improve it in the future again.
Does it have a page two yet. When Brave search was launched and discussed on HN Brave search only had one page of search results. It was like five or ten results.
How would you say that the Brave Browser and Brave Search compare with something like Firefox and DuckDuckGo (plus a plugin, like uBlock Origins), if you've used those?
Anyone else care to comment? Personally, i'm still someone that's used more to Firefox and is more familiar with Mozilla due to them having been around for longer, but their recent decisions might make some people reconsider their choices and look into exploring new options.
For browser biggest UI difference is tabs - they squeeze instead of scrolling. There are no plugins that can create a proper sidebar, but out of the box you can organise them into foldable groups.
Search results are noticeably better, especially for non-english and location-specific results. What's worse is image search - unlike with text you tend to get only 2-3 good, relevant results, everything else is only somewhat related. I suggest giving it a try even if you'll decide against browser switch.
Stock Chrome has a flag that activates a combined two-tab reading list + bookmarks sidebar. Brave has the same flag, but for some reason the sidebar didn't list bookmarks the last time I tried.
There are actually flags for enabling tab scrolling if you want, and tab squeeze is also adjustable via flags.
UI wise the big thing for me are tab groups. They are straight crack, and the stock Chromium implementation Brave inherits probably my favourite.
Apart from that, the main thing you can't adjust via flags is Chromium's style of using separate browser profiles instead of Firefox's multiple containers within one profile/window/session.
The bigger UI differences are on mobile, where again, tab groups are crack and the implementation excellent.
> I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).
Looking at the settings, it looks like everyone is opted-in the data collection by default, and you have to manually opt-out, which is a nightmare for people like me who delete their browsing data on browser exit. I will stick with DuckDuckGo.
I completely agree. I almost guarantee if they hired a couple hundred people to look for spam and isolate that out and feed it back into ML models they could eliminate 80% of it. It's SO obvious.
Just let me mark my results (and let me bookmark them) then let me search in that subset of bookmarks aswell as use them in your algo to improve general search.
You know what, I welcome a new search provider, even if it's by a cryptocurrency company. I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo.
What I don't see is where Brave gets its image search results from. After Microsoft blatantly started serving the CCP by blocking queries for "tank man", which as far as I know they've never actually apologised for, just explained it as "a filter with more impact than expected" or some BS like that, I found out that most "competing" search engines bought all of their image search from Microsoft, leading to the same kind of censorship on platforms such as duckduckgo.
Brave says it's using "third parties" to generate the results but I can't easily see which third party that would be. If they are using Bing like all the others, I wouldn't trust their image search engine in the slightest.
Personally, I'll just assume they are for now, because they don't seem to clarify this further anywhere else.
From what I can tell, there are four image/video search providers in the world: Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu. The rest all seem to license their results from one of the big four, mostly from Bing. When I need to pick from those four, I'll stick with Google; their censorship is relatively mild. I was hoping Brave Search would prove to be an alternative in this area, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Brave has bought a search company that became what is now "Brave Search". They are using their own index.
The "third-parties" bit, IIUIC, is the part when their index does not give good results and it falls back to working like startpage: they send the anonymized query to Google/Bing and take the results to send to the user. I believe that the idea is that they can use this as a way to improve their own index.
They also show on the results page how much of the results are coming from them vs from third-parties [0]
This is true for their normal search, but for their image search they always seem to say "results from third parties" if you click the info button.
Maybe their image search just hasn't encountered enough websites featuring the word "bird" or maybe their disclaimer is shown more often than intended, but I get the idea that image search is always done externally.
While I don't think much about BAT, having a browser with a nice wallet integration is a huge step forward in making Web3/DApps more useable for non-technical people.
It's still a long way, but I think this is one of the first big steps in the right direction.
> I'd rather see Qwant succeed, but their search is having trouble competing with even duckduckgo
Weird. I have found Qwant giving better results than ddg. (No affiliation)
What is weird is that there is one small change that would likely make any of these engines outperform others in everyday usage. Just let me (easily) blacklist domains in my results.
If you are referring to it being blocked in China, well, are we at all surprised that private companies kowtow to autocratic regimes in favor of making more money?
No, we're not referring to it being blocked only in China. It was blocked on 4th June worldwide by all search engines that rely on Bing (DDG, Qwant, Ecosia, ...)
I think they stopped doing it long time ago (and I cannot see these links now), but if my memory serves me well basically these links were taking you to Google and Bing with the same query, respectively. I.e. they were directly linking to competitors, just in case your original search at Yandex was not satisfactory.
> I'd honestly rather have a search provider run by the CPC
Any reason behind your preference? It baffles me to hear you'd rather use a heavily censored and CCP-controlled search provider than a search provider from a free market with an alternative business model.
As @skyfaller posted elsewhere in this discussion:
> Cryptocurrency isn't just a disaster, it's several disasters bundled together. Anyone working with it in any way, anyone who has a stake in cryptocurrency, has been compromised, and can no longer be trusted, just as your neighbor who is trying to sell you on their multilevel marketing scheme can no longer be trusted. (Did they invite you to dinner? Oh, surprise, it's just to sell you on their MLM again.) They are ignoring multiple dire ethical problems as they sell their relationship with you for funny money.
Basically, any involvement with cryptocurrency is a strong signal of untrustworthiness and lack of scruples. Mere political censorship isn't in the same league.
For non-technical searches, mostly stuff relating to news, politics, or Covid, Google is next to useless at this point due to their attempts to combat misinformation. Even their autocomplete functionality guides potential search queries in an entirely unorganic manner. For instance, something may be trending according to google, while simultaneously being blacklisted as an autocomplete option- if it has Any elements of wrongthink about it.
> I read this as "Google is perfectly capable of determining the truth".
Well, OP was the one that defined the info they were looking for as misinformation as far as I can tell.
And then I stated I could find offical sources for politcs and COVID. These are not Google's opinions but simply a fact. WHO, RKI, CDC, etc are all offical sources of information for COVID, etc. This is not them define what is true or false but merely providing me with the offical information so I can educate myself.
Nope, I'm not looking for misinformation. I said that Google's attempts at combatting misinformation often hinders my searches. Oftentimes, I'll be looking for a pre-print or something from a scientific journal that is tangentially related to Covid, but Google will basically spam the official CDC, WHO, and news articles urging people to get vaccinated.
For any political news, sometimes I'll be looking to verify a story I remember reading from a few days or weeks past, or I'm looking to do my own fact check of a claim...and I'll find that several mainstream news sources will have republished the same story(not the one I'm looking for), unrelated to whatever claim I'm checking- similar only in sharing a keyword or person of interest- and Google rewards this behavior by pushing the trusted organizations to the top of my searches. It's like forum sliding, except it's search. Then using ddg or brave, the story that I'm looking for will often be the first result.
It's a very insidious antipattern, because it's hard to even know if your perception is being actively screwed with.
Trying to look specifically for research papers on regular Google search is always a bad idea, covid or not, which is why https://scholar.google.com is a thing.
This is what drove me off the platform. Searching Bing (primary), Yandex (rarely turns up gold), and DDG (generally useless for the news) each seems to mitigate these issues. But you really shouldn't have to check three different search engines to not feel like you're being denied information.
And yes, Yandex is a Russian operation, something to keep in mind.
I’m generally happy with Google’s results as well, but I also acknowledge that both of our experiences could be a symptom of us wanting to see the things Google that has not labeled as misinformation and it would be harder to detect subtle missing perspectives that might be being downranked if the results shown are generally pleasing to us.
Joe Rogan also commented on this cover-up a few days ago:
> "Look, if I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to Duck Duck Go. I wasn’t finding them on Google,” Rogan urged.
He's not an anti-vaxxer. He is pro-vaccine for all other illnesses. He's also said he doesn't care if you choose to take it, just don't mandate it For all people when the science is not clear about the cost:benefit ratio for certain populations such as children.
That being against mandating these emergency experimental COVID-19 vaccines for all individuals is being conflated as being an "anti-vaxxer" shows how much propaganda has caused some people to lose all rationality on this topic.
Rogan says whatever it takes to keep his core audience on board, when he isn't just parroting the opinion of the last person he spoke to.
His core audience are conspiracy theorists from his early days, which has a very big overlap with full on anti-vaxers.
It wouldn't surprise me if he still believed the moon landings were faked, he just realises you don't get million plus listens and a Spotify deal making that sort of thing public.
> What is the process that manufacturers are following to potentially make a COVID-19 vaccine available by EUA?
> Vaccine manufacturers are undertaking a development process that includes tens of thousands of study participants to generate non-clinical, clinical, and manufacturing information needed by FDA for the agency to determine whether the known and potential benefits outweigh the known and potential risks of a vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19.
> When the phase 3 portion of the human clinical trial reaches a predetermined point that informs how well a vaccine prevents COVID-19, as discussed and agreed to in advance with FDA, an independent group (called a data safety monitoring board) will review the data and inform the manufacturer of the results. Based on the data and the interpretation of the data by this group, manufacturers decide whether and when to submit an EUA request to FDA, taking into consideration input from FDA.
> After FDA receives an EUA request, our career scientists and physicians will evaluate all of the information included in the manufacturer’s submission.
> While FDA’s evaluation is ongoing, we will also schedule a public meeting of our Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which is made up of external scientific and public health experts from throughout the country. During the meeting, these experts, who are carefully screened for any potential conflicts of interest, will discuss the safety and effectiveness data so that the public and scientific community will have a clear understanding of the data and information that FDA is evaluating to make a decision whether to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.
> Following the advisory committee meeting, FDA’s career professional staff will consider the input of the advisory committee members and continue their evaluation of the submission to determine whether the available safety and effectiveness and manufacturing data support an emergency use authorization of the specific COVID-19 vaccine in the United States.
Hmmmm, who to trust...a so-so actor from a 90's sitcom, or hundreds of scientists
His stance on covid in general boils down to “be healthy enough that you don’t need a vaccine”. He consistently argues that the real issue is obesity and that being healthy and fit (and taking vitamins) reduces the risk of covid to nearly nil for young people, to the point that even the small risk of vaccine side effects or unknown long term effects could be worth considering. That’s not the same as telling people not to get vaccinated.
No I think it's more dangerous when wide-reaching platforms like CNN spread misinformation about him and are completely unapologetic about it [0]. The most Joe Rogan has done regarding "misinformation" is telling people they should not get the vaccine and discussing vaccine side effects that, while yes they are not great in number, for every other platform it's a taboo topic for some weird reason.
> The most Joe Rogan has done regarding "misinformation" is telling people they should not get the vaccine
I'm baffled by this comment and how that alone isn't concerning to you. All the experts say the vaccine is safe and effective, and yet we have people listening to Joe Rogan on the topic.
Joe Rogan also claimed to have taken ivermectin and experimental antibodies and yet seems to claim that ivermectin is what did the trick. I don't know what his motivations are but he's clearly confused/misinformed.
edit: to clarify, I'm not defending CNN in this instance at all. Both cases of information are terrible.
He’s not anti-vax. People need to stop throwing labels around. It’s equivalent to calling people the 4 letter n word.
He’s said repeatedly that he doesn’t see the point of young fit and healthy people getting the Covid “vaccine”. And especially not for kids. If you are old or have medical conditions or obese, then it might help you. The current shots are merely a potential severe symptom mitigator.
Being opposed to a non-long term tested, short lasting, unaccountable shot which doesn’t even prevent catching and transmission of the virus doesn’t make someone anti-vax. Also opposing mandates of such a "vaccine" doesn't make someone "anti-vax".
This is very specific to the Covid “vaccine”, not for other typical vaccines like polio, measles etc which are long term tested for over 70 years (smallpox for 2 centuries) and are also super effective at preventing catching and transmitting the virus.
The current Covid shots don’t even fit the definition of a vaccine as they don’t prevent catching and transmission of the virus in any meaningful way. And even mild and asymptomatic cases have the same viral load as the unvaccinated which basically creates the problem of “silent spreaders”.
The definition of a "vaccine" is supposed to be: "The term “vaccine” means any substance designed to be administered to a human being for the prevention of 1 or more diseases."
The Canadian definition is: "When you're vaccinated, you build immunity (ability to resist infection). This protects you from getting the disease and prevents you from spreading it to others. Some vaccines protect you for several years and some protect you for the rest of your life."
When something isn't preventing the disease, nor effective after 3-6 months, how can it be considered a "vaccine"? And how can one mandate it?
As for “safe and effective”, that’s just become a false marketing term. How can you say that when 10 months after pushing the shots, they are discovering new rising side effects and Sweden, Iceland, Denmark are banning Moderna and Canada is not allowing it for under 24 year olds? Or 6 months later, they are restricting AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson? How can something be considered “safe” in this case? When something hasn’t been long term tested, how can you trust the “experts” for it being safe? And since they wane off in 3-6 months, how are they “effective”?
> claimed to have taken ivermectin and experimental antibodies
He took what his doctor prescribed him. He specifically said that both the monoclonal antibodies and maybe ivermectin too could have helped him. He didn’t say only ivermectin helped him. He also said that him being fit and healthy must have helped him, something most people don't even talk about.
Just a few years ago, same people pushing the Covid “vaccine” used to say that drugs shouldn’t be rushed and fda can’t be trusted because one-third of the drugs approved by the FDA and (by inference) Health Canada from 2001 through 2010 had major safety issues years after the medications were made widely available to patients. This was more common for those given "accelerated approval". Follow-up period was 11.7 years and it took 4.2 years after the drugs were approved for these safety concerns to come to light. Given longer lifespans for youth, there is a potential for harm. So, it is perfectly valid for youth to be concerned about the lack of long-term safety data for the COVID-19 vaccines. Lack of this data makes informed consent impossible.
In the UK for example, the rate of cases is now higher in the fully vaccinated group in anyone over 29 age group. The 18-29 group will also soon be higher in fully vaccinated as the vaccine wanes off in 3-6 months. Yet everyone's blaming the unvaccinated instead of the ineffective "vaccine". Page 13 table:
> It’s equivalent to calling people the 4 letter n word.
No, it's absolutely different thing. One is derogative racial slur, carrying a baggage of slavery, violence, rapes, and systemic injustice that's present in the society to this day; and the other one is a description of people who choose to ignore science and are willing to risk life of others basing on their anecdotal evidence.
I said "4 letter". You are confusing it with another unrelated word.
> who choose to ignore science and are willing to risk life of others basing on their anecdotal evidence
You clearly did not read the rest of my comment other than the first line which you also read incorrectly. And I didn't mention a single anecdotal thing in my comment so not sure what that's all about. So it seems like you are commenting for a specific agenda.
But I wouldn't waste much more time replying to this person, because they were recently asking HN for advice on how to use software to write a lawsuit they're self-litigating. Fifty bucks says it's some "MUH FREEDUHM" anti-mask/vaccine requirement lawsuit.
Am I back on Reddit? Such ivory tower elitism is what's wrong with intellectual authoritarians. 80% of litigants in my country are self-represented. You are showing elitism towards them.
Also if you read that post you dug up carefully, I wasn't asking for "how to use software to write a lawsuit". I was asking what alternatives to Google Docs and Word do lawyers use. Those are 2 very different things.
And you are agreeing with the person who clearly incorrectly thought of the wrong word even though I said "4 letter word". So you are okay with misinformation for your agenda. Nuance and facts are clearly not an expertise as you missed in my original comment.
I'm assuming he's just upset that blogspam that inanely conflates VAERS with evidence of injuries actually related to COVID vaccines shows up higher on DDG because that reinforces his false presuppositions.
I'm still holding out with Firefox despite Mozilla trying very hard to get rid of us (to the point where the thought has struck me more than once if the current CEO of Mozilla is in the pocket of Google).
If at some point the last competing mainstream browser engine is gone I'll probably go for Brave and I might start testing it this week.
Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) makes $3 million a year, and Mozilla asks you to donate "to help a nonprofit organization".
"On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
"By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."
This lady then goes on and on talking about "social justice".
Also Google deal produces 90% of Mozilla's revenue. I would say Mozilla is really controlled opposition.
Mozilla has been prioritizing activism while the main product that brings the cash in falls behind. If the current trend continues, Mozilla will cease to exist. In a normal company, it should be focused on fixing this ASAP, but Mozilla seems contend continuing as is.
Does anyone know who actually controls the direction of the organization? How are the board members chosen/elected? Is there a way for the general public to pick other board members?
Importantly: The donations go to Mozilla Foundation, not to its for-profit subsidiary Mozilla Corp. MozCorp is who develop Firefox, the Foundation focuses more on political activism. If you want to help fund the people developing Firefox, one of the Corporation's paid products is the place to send your money.
I am not sure I want to know about your political opinions if you consider Mitchell as being "far-left" (not that I'm a great fan of hers). That is certainly not what the far left is, neither historically nor in the contemporary world.
"...That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
Can anyone explain what this actually means? It sounds like she's saying that taking a lower pay by 5x is too much to ask of her, but then "people and their families" doesn't make any sense, because its 1 person and 1 family.
Thats not even getting into how true is may or may not be, or how its still a lot of money overall, even if its not compared to the market overall.
How much do CEOs at similarly sized tech corporations get paid? It's fine to say you dislike the current CEO's performance, but I don't see how her compensation is relevant without other datapoints to compare to.
Well, you know, Brendan Eich was CEO of Mozilla and they were flying high.
Then he got cancelled, and with it was cancelled the dream of having a real platform that can compete with Google. (Brave, with all of its advantages, is still a fork of Chrome and in that way promotes the Chrome monopoly.)
Since then, the new CEO of Mozilla has made herself a lot of money, and she seems perfectly happy to destroy the long term viability of the company for some quick injections of cash that can justify her bonuses.
And Eich single-handedly created the only other viable browser in the market starting from scratch [market wise, not technology wise]. Yet, somehow, people still think this was better than leaving Eich as head of Mozilla.
Per StatCounter, Mozilla's market share decline started in early 2010 (including mobile, late 2010 for desktop only) and Eich was fired (resigned, but that's BS) in early 2014.
Eich was still at Mozilla (not CEO) when Mozilla under-invested in desktop performance, failed to get Firefox OS off the ground, and most likely laid the groundwork to switching to Yahoo.
I was influencer only until 2013 when I took over engineering, so I’ll take some blame for desktop, especially from then till I left.
Mozilla bungled Firefox OS after I left, lost Andreas Gal and most of the top talent, lost Li Gong, while KaiOS based on same code and business plan, with some of the talent, took over and grew to over 200M phones. Blame Mozilla there.
I had nothing to do with the switch to Yahoo. That deal was a gleam in someone else’s eye and I left before it was done.
Last thing: how did not-me leadership do after I left, and I started Brave and grew it to 40M users while Firefox lost over 50M? You may dislike me, but your fantasy blame game cannot excuse Mozilla outcomes lately.
> Brendan Eich was CEO of Mozilla and they were flying high
flying high for all eleven of those days or just some of them? :P
> And Eich single-handedly created the only other viable browser in the market starting from scratch [market wise, not technology wise].
This is a bizarre re-writing of the history of Mozilla. Brendan Eich was obviously very important but he definitely wasn't alone, their corporate owner at the start was AOL, then a gigantic company, and he wasn't originally involved in Firefox when it started, it was a rebellious offshoot from the rest of Mozilla's large number of existing products, some dating back to the Netscape days.
I was involved with the mozilla/browser team from the start, we shared an irc channel and knew how to use it to take down Netscape inside AOL and then restart the browser market.
Who are you and where were you inside Netscape then? Or are you just lying about me?
Leaving aside the whole "please don't fulminate" thing, you're going to have to be specific about which part is incorrect. Is it just the "he wasn't originally involved in Firefox when it started" word choice and you'd like that amended to "he didn't start Firefox (though was aware of it and soon incorporated it into Mozilla's strategic plans)"?
The righteous demand for truth would be a bit more inspiring if you'd similarly correct the GP for "lying" about you being the one true Mozillian, though.
edit: also, rereading my original post, I'm sorry if the first line reads as mean spirited. The ":P" was meant for the poster's inconsistent recollection of events.
I reject your false dilemma split across a parenthetical aside (which shows your prose skills :-P). No, it's not either "he didn't start Firefox (though was aware of it and soon incorporated it into Mozilla's strategic plans)". I was close with all the principals, we talked about doing it from the very start, we strategized on how to get it out under Netscape management radar.
Ask Dave Hyatt, Blake Ross, Ian Hickson, or others if you dare. Unlike you (I have to presume), I have friends who support me and will testify if you bug them and they are willing to answer HN anon hostiles like you.
I never said I was "the one true Mozillian", that's another false dichotomy from you, and a jerk move. You didn't answer my question about the basis for your hot take here. I doubt you were there at Netscape. Did you just make it up, or get it third hand?
I totally get you, as a long time Mozilla fan, I'm sad to see the direction towards which Firefox and Mozilla as a whole are going.
But it's not like Brave is ethically or technically better. They use Blink (the same engine as Chrome) and therefore contribute to the mono-culture of the web.[1]
They collect donations on behalf of content creators[2], they created this "Attention Token" based on etherium to replace ads with all the controversies surrounding cryptocurrencies (from the pyramid-scheme to the global-warming topic, I know the latter is not valid with Etherium anymore), …
I think that these days, it's more about choosing the lesser evil as a browser.
We do indeed use Chromium, though patched for security and privacy reasons (see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...). I don't see how that's an ethical or technical mark against us, however. Early on we did tests with Gecko, but soon found that if we were to build a compatible (with the Web as it is) browser, we'd need to do so with Chromium.
Your claim that Brave collected donations on behalf of others is quite misleading. There was a bit of confusing UI in our early tips interface (called 'Payments' at the time). We clearly marked verified creators as such, but gave no special marking for unverified creators (our approach resembled that of Twitter's blue checkmarks).
Regarding the "donations" themselves, we allowed Brave users to direct BAT from our user-growth pool (that is, Brave's own tokens) to creators. If those tokens were not claimed by the intended recipient after 1 year, they (Brave's tokens) would be recycled back into the system. As Wikipedia records, there were major UI/UX changes made about 48 hours later which dramatically improved the feature, IMHO.
Brave is just Chromium with a cryptocurrency scam bolted on to it. I'm unhappy with Firefox's ad-related changes recently, but Brave is definitely not an option. If it came to it, I'd use a WebKit browser — objectively worse, but not clearly compromised.
Yeah, built-in adblockers (including the blocking being written in Rust and built into the browser, so it won't get nerfed by Manifest v3. Also capable of doing CNAME unmasking, the thing that makes uBO better on Firefox, btw) and other anti-tracking measures, running their own end to end encrypted sync architecture and standalone revenue streams like Brave Talk, their Brave Ads-driven takes on Search and News, etc. so they can be actually independent. Yeah. Just a cryptocurrency scam.
The coin itself is one of the few that has a value based on some actual use, at that:
Brave sells adspace, gets paid in Money™. They keep a cut, take the rest and buy BAT with it, give it to users. Users can then tip content creators with the BAT and get some compensation for Brave's part in killing tracking ads.
Many people are idiots who do think that BAT is for them to get rich but like hell it is. Single ad viewers aren't very valuable, they only matter in aggregate, so you'll only ever get pocket money as BAT.
Brave is Chromium with more web features and more privacy and crypto stuff that is turned off by default.
It has Web Torrents, IPFS, Tor, built-in ad blocking, etc.
I just don't understand how someone can be "mad" at a feature that is turned off by default, especially when most browsers ship with literal spyware turned on.
Cryptocurrency isn't just a disaster, it's several disasters bundled together. Anyone working with it in any way, anyone who has a stake in cryptocurrency, has been compromised, and can no longer be trusted, just as your neighbor who is trying to sell you on their multilevel marketing scheme can no longer be trusted. (Did they invite you to dinner? Oh, surprise, it's just to sell you on their MLM again.) They are ignoring multiple dire ethical problems as they sell their relationship with you for funny money.
I wonder what it would take to trigger an official investigation, because if they manage this Google has destroyed a values for many hundred million dollars and also solidified their position as a monopoly.
Hostility towards users asking questions as seen in the tabstrip API bug. (A really simple thing that I fix on a weekly basis in 4 minutes every time I restart Firefox but somehow next to impossible for Mozilla. Although I should admit they are making it harder and harder for me as well.)
Pushing Pocket (which is nice and could have become a nice source of income from users like me who wants to support the browser) in a dishonest way and as a built in part of Firefox instead of an extension that people could remove, saying there were no ties when there definitely was.
Almost scaring the crap out of a number of the more careful ones of us when they installed a "I, Robot extension" or something without any warning.
Milking the browser part of the system dry to fund its "mission", then laying off browser engineers and the Rust team to save money.
Pretending to be a community when fundraising, but a dictator when making decisions.
Misleading people to think they suppprt Firefox when they donate to the foundation, then sending nothing to the browser and burning it all on "its mission".
> Milking the browser...to fund its "mission", then laying off browser engineers and the Rust team to save money...Misleading people to think they suppprt [sic] Firefox when they donate to the foundation, then sending nothing to the browser and burning it all on "its mission"
This is where they lost me as a donor. Mozilla can't go a month without launching a new idiot project.
Do we know what fraction of their revenue gets spent on Firefox and Rust versus everything else?
Mozilla literally can't win on HN or Reddit. People criticize them for taking money from Google and then when they try to monetize new ideas, they again get criticism.
The Mozilla Foundation (where your donations go) is not the one launching these new ideas that you hate so much. If you are going to hate something, at least hate the right thing.
Yeah, people want a spotless FOSS project run entirely on donations. It's silly, and I'd wish people started waking up to the realities of the world. You can still do a decent job while living according to them.
The strange thing is that it shouldn't even be a timing thing all that much, a bunch of SaaS apps were already running by 2015 and subscriptions were becoming a more normal thing. Even Office 365 had been a thing for five years at that point, Dropbox and Evernote for eight.
But I definitely remember the hatred, and I was one of the haters back then.
Maybe the difference is that the initial Firefox userbase came more from FOSS people where there's more of a purely altruistic expectation, while I at least approached new browsers more from an IT startup culture angle, wanting to support organizations that do good things more than hanging onto moralisms.
I dunno. I've been really tempted to get a KaiOS phone lately (trying to get away from smartphone, but can't go full dumb-phone yet). I'd probably have sprung for it if I could find a Nokia 8110 4G, in black, that worked with US carriers other than AT&T.
In the real world, Firefox is already dead and the only real competing browser engine is Webkit/Safari.
Firefox's market share is 3.6% and on mobile only 0.5%. On many websites, mobile traffic is now at about 70%. Firefox doesn't even show up in dashboards, and is smaller than various Chromium clones and/or regional browsers.
We've been here before (hell, 3% looked massive back then, and in a much smaller market). Marketshare is not an issue, the relationship with the community is. A strong community, united around a core of values and secure that the product is built with these values at heart, will evangelize such product out of a niche. Unfortunately, the current Mozilla leadership doesn't seem to understand that significant chunks of its community have lost the faith.
The loss of market share has nothing to do with the browser in itself. Mozilla simply has no reach. Chrome is shipped via Android and on the desktop via services having a billion+ users, like Youtube and Gmail.
Mozilla has no reach or push. It's not an engineering problem.
It's not like FF was ever shipped with Windows. It's just that enough people saw enough value and purpose in it, to go out and get it themselves.
You can install FF on Android in a second on the Play Store, it's easier than it's ever been on the desktop; but you have to want to install it in the first place. Some of this want can be generated by feature excellence, some by peer pressure; but for a long time now, FF has lagged in producing the former and its leadership has actively sabotaged the community that can provide the latter.
Obviously FF was helped by MS dropping the ball in a way Google has not (yet), but in my opinion what happened then could be done again. Antitrust action is coming for both Apple and Google, Mozilla should be ready to pounce right there and then - but it cannot happen if the leadership does not understand that there is a problem.
People say that but for ages FF simply couldn't do what IE did. ActiveX was a thing and FF just didn't support it. Java applets broke all over, and CSS support was a minefield. Most of the mainstream web was outright broken in MozSuite and FF. It wasn't clear at all that FF was "superior" in any way - in fact, the build system was a nightmare, you couldn't embed it anywhere, you had to fix proxy settings all the time (because it had its internal stuff, not using the Windows settings)... Yeah it had extensions, but a lot of people didn't even know what those were (and making them wasn't particularly easy - easier than dealing with MSVC++, but still not easy). Still, people were invested in the success of FF; they tolerated the brokenness and pestered the hell out of website owners to fix their shit and evangelized the browser to friends and family. Because people cared about FF and what it represented: an open browser to use the open web, built for people and geeks - not "consumers" or "enterprise customers".
Now people don't care, because Mozilla is seen as Just Another Silicon Valley Corp, with overpaid execs doing shady deals to push shit down our throat. At that point, "they are all the same" so might as well use the browser that works more often (Chrome). This can change, but it needs a positive shock.
The competition is stagnant. The web is a hostile cesspool and you need tools like ad-blockers to make it bearable, just like you had to buy antivirus software back in the day. The competition doesn't provide that, and this is where Firefox can differentiate itself.
Casual users don't care about technical differences, but they will care about "install this browser and see no ads nor cookie banners ever". The Enterprise will be happy to pay for this because of the security benefits.
Hell, I'm talking about casual users but the truth is that Mozilla has even managed to alienate power users with stupid & useless UI changes and "features".
> It's just that enough people saw enough value and purpose in it, to go out and get it themselves.
This happened at the time when no other browser vendor drove any kind of serious marketing campaign. Even so, Firefox only reached 30% market share at its peak.
Then Chrome shot out, backed by Google's marketing budget, bundled with popular software installers and featured at the "Internet home page": "Still running Firefox? Upgrade to Chrome now!" (quote is approximate, but very close)
The difference is that when Firefox initially appeared, Microsoft was treating Internet Explorer as a "finished product" and letting it go completely stagnant.
Google and Apple aren't making that same mistake, at least not to that same level. The developers are happy with the tooling, and the fact that ECMAScript and HTML API's keep evolving faster than much of the ecosystem can keep up with. The casual public is happy about a fresh coat of paint, or putting tabs in a different place every few years.
There just isn't the same opportunity due to incumbent vulnerability today.
As I mentioned below, antitrust authorities are coming for Apple and Google. The opportunity will be there very, very soon; but you can't ride a wave without a surfboard, and at the moment it looks like Mozilla is more interested in selling product-placement stickers than building a great board.
while the relative decline is definitely bad mind you that is still ~200 million users. The internet's pretty huge. Not so dead you couldn't theoretically at least crawl back from.
I have been using Firefox since the Pheonix/Firebird days where you download it and unzipped it to a folder.
I left a few months ago because I just couldn't get the performance where I needed it. I unfortunately had to go to yet-another-Chromium browser and just chose Brave because it seems like it has the right priorities. After installing the same extensions I was using on Firefox it's pretty much the same, it's just faster.
I hate saying that, after two decades of using Firefox. I want another browser engine. We need that competition.
We lost Microsoft. We still have Apple with Safari and I hope Mozilla can hold on with Firefox.
But if Google ever cuts that search funding I don't see a great future.
It doesn't seem as good. My first search: what's the latest minecraft version
Brave: 1.14.4
Google: 1.17
Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years.
Second search: 白の意味
Brave: On Japan location 6 garbage search results + irrelevant wikipedia page. On United states 3 garbage search results before a relevant result. The first result is literally a private YouTube video. Seriously?
Google: Has a snippet about the meaning of white and the first result is a dictionary entry.
The indexing for Google seems to be equally as private, so brave search just seems like a downgrade.
Here is one more, search: Ten Elements of the False COVID Narrative
Google: nowhere
Brave: first result
And it's not like Google just didn't index the site, it works for topics that are "less controversial", search: Universal Clock implies Universal Clockwork
Google: first result
Brave: first result
Whatever the explanation - either Google censors some topics, or its search engine works differently - the result is the same, for this example Brave outperformed Google.
It’s odd, for the first example the exact article you were looking for is the first result for me whether or not I am searching signed in or from a private session.
The second example, “Ten Elements of the False COVID Narrative”, assuming you’re looking for it at scienceblog, is the fourth result. Above the fold, at least. (Edit: Sort of nevermind, I missed that you didn’t use quotes for that one. Without quotes the scienceblog page appears in slot 11).
I am in the US and get my results in English, if that matters. I checked to see if toggling safe search changed anything, but nope.
weight and aging a paradox part 1 (without the quotes) is first place on Google for me.
Seems like google only fails on politically sensitive topics like unpopular opinions about COVID. I suspect they might be using a filter, or even a different ranking system for certain keywords.
Yeah, I've tried switching to other search engines a few times, but one domain where a lot of them really lack is non-English results.
Google has increasingly turned to garbage these past few years. But searching anything non-English on other search engines really feels like randomly populated results.
Location and temporal results are also lacking on non-Google results. Google also over-optimizes for them, so sometimes DDG is nice when Google is for some reason absolutely convinced I'm searching from some random town in another country and is only serving up results for that area.
Google cares a lot about protecting user's privacy. Take a look at their privacy policy. For example, what other API provider requires you to get security audits ($15k-$75k yearly) when handling sensitive user data.
i think a lot of people never really understood googles business model.
google absolutely wants to protect their users privacy from third parties. their ideal situation would be if they're the only one's knowing everything about their users so they can allow third parties to advertise things to their users.
if they'd leak any of this information, they'd be compromising their main business model.
so yes, people can trust google to do their everything to keep their information from reaching anyone else, including forcing said third parties to undergo paid audits to verify that nobody is leeching their user data.
for some reason, a lot of people got it into their head that google literally sells information. i'm not sure why this ever started, as - at least as far as i am aware - google never tried to do anything even remotely like that
This. Big Tech companies or their divisions are advertising service companies and AI cults. They sell targeting, not the raw data. The data is useful for selling targeting services and feeding their AIs, actually selling it to others would be stupid of them.
Yeah…because Google and all other big tech want a monopoly on user data. Do you think any of them want to ever not protect user privacy in the way you defined it?
They still have all this data on users. They don’t even tell you what they have. They have the BS marketing of Google Takeout. It includes nothing about the profile they have made on me. The logs and data they have on what I have clicked, etc.
Google wants to even protect you or I from knowing how much data they have. That’s not the protection any one should want.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me being worse at using keywords to search for what I need but I’ve noticed that it’s so much harder to find things that are actually helpful via google on stackoverflow etc.
Most annoying thing is when I restrict keywords and they still show up on the search results.
Now when I can’t find something on Google, instead of refining keywords, I give DDG or Bing a go first (both not always successful but half the time I find more useful links).
Amit Singhal, who was Head of Search at Google until 2016, has always emphasized that Google will not use artificial intelligence for ranking search results. The reason he gave was that AI algorithms work like a black box and that it is infeasible to improve them incrementally.
Then in 2016, John Giannandrea, an AI expert, took over. Since then, Google has increasingly relied on AI algorithms, which seem to work well enough for main-stream search queries. For highly specific search queries made by power users, however, these algorithms often fail to deliver useful results. My guess is that it is technically very difficult to adapt these new AI algorithms so that they also work well for that type of search queries.
> On a more serious tone, the quality of Google search results is continuously degrading.
Do you know of any publically available analysis that tries to measure search quality? And that shows that google's results are getting worse over time? It seems like a hard thing to measure, and a few people on HN saying "I searched for x and got garbage results" doesn't seem like the most robust thing.
Less flippantly, people are notoriously bad at objectively remembering stuff. I certainly have no idea how good google search results were even 1 week ago, let alone 1,2 or 3+ or years.
Maybe on an absolute basis, but on a relative basis I still find Google results (esp for localized results) far above any other search engine. And that gap hasn't narrowed at all since I first started using DDG several years back.
Google used to be good at one point in time. Now its search results aren't very relevant, it returns what it thinks it should interest you, not what you've actually searched for. It doesn't matter if you do a verbatim search, it will still try to be smart and use alternative terms.
Sometimes you need to search an intentional misspelling, say, "Aple" (just an example), Google will helpfully try to correct you with "did you mean Apple?", and even if you put the word in quotes you still get results for Apple, not my intentionally misspelled search. Listen to what I'm trying to tell you, dumb machine.
They've tweaked it so it only respond to what it thinks you want to search, not what you've asked of it, and there's no way around it.
Computers are so much better when they take your input literally.
The smartness gets me, especially with the image search. It used to be pretty useful.
Now Google seems to really want me to see what its ML model thinks is in the image. No, when I upload a picture of an actor, I'm not trying to search for pictures of "adult" or "man". Or, my recent favorite that had three people in the image, a suggested search for "sharing".
I knew someone would try, which is why I specified this was just an example, I'm sure this time with that made up word it works, but when it doesn't it's pretty obvious and infuriating.
And autocorrect is a net loss if you can't correct the autocorrect.
There is verbatim and back in the day this is also what doublequotes meant.
Google has gotten away by blaming it on spam since back when matt_cutts was here, but I fail to see how spam can possibly be the reason why neither doublequotes nor verbatim works (edit:) unless spammers have found their way into Googles ranking algorithm to neuter all exact match operators.
They had it. The fact it doesn't work anymore is probably because some big brains at Google strongly believe that their AI knows better. Such hubris is the reason why Google sucks today and it absolutely rocked 20 years ago.
Why not use a real example instead of "Aple" (which returns what you expect: the stock for Apple Hospitality REIT)? Shouldn't be hard at all if this really is such a common problem.
I can't speak for others, but I move on in frustration. I don't meticulously document Google's myriad failures. Even if I dove into my search history to find one, odds are good you wouldn't have the same experience. And the divergence would increase with time and further training of the AI, to the point that even I wouldn't get the same result.
Every NLP AI is like that, it’s like trying to make a mentally challenged person do something for you and you have to correct them for something extremely simple and it is frustrating.
Yes, Google, I did not type North Korea DHL by accident. I really mean the odd one because I’m curious if they have DHL but I really don’t feel like explaining it to you. Could you please simply don’t assume stuff by default? I appreciate the “did you mean” suggestions but let’s not try to be too smart.
Google was great when it understood that North Korea and DPRK are the same thing but these days it’s like “North Korea DHL? You must be trying to send a package to Republic of Korea”. Maybe that’s because there’s not much ad revenue from helping out people to get information about DPRK.
I only get relevant results such as "Does DHL deliver to North Korea?" and "DHL establishes operation in North Korea". Do you have a better example actually illustrating this?
This time it returned relevant result for me too, I recall getting annoyed by it some time ago so maybe its not relevant example anymore.
Anyway, it happens all the time. Goole assumes that I mean something and I need to quote words trying to enforce my query. Pretty much every time when the returned results don't include the words I typed is a frustration for me. It makes it very hard to fix the query because I need to study every result instead of having no results or obviously low quality results.
It's especially hard when I'm not well versed in the subject, so I need to go through the results only to realize that these results are not about the thing I'm looking for.
BTW, I do less Googling these days. I would usually search Reddit, HN and StackOverflow directly from their websites as the search results would be from the expected domain and not too smart but just enough smart to correct typos etc. Also the filters work better.
Imagine you're talking to your friend, and you say the exact same thing you tell Google: "North Korea DHL". They're not going to have any idea what you're talking about (they can guess) - do you want to ship something there? Are you making a comment/observation? A business opportunity? Your friend would probably ask clarifying questions to narrow down what you're talking about, or you would be more specific upfront.
Computers don't magically read your mind nor they know your intent. Adding quotes to search and other 'advanced' techniques are the equivalent of adding context to a conversation.
Personally I have rarely experienced what you have, and when I do it's usually for specific international queries (like searching for a Belgian slang word from Google US) which isn't an issue if you use the correct locale/language for what you're searching for. Obviously it's not perfect, I'm just surprised by your anecdote in the absence of a real example.
It's possible that my habits don't represent how the general population uses the search. I've read that many people are asking questions, not simply searching for keyword and as a result Google tries to optimize for that. But then again, when I ask questions it's also hit and miss for me.
I also no longer get good navigation suggestion from Google Maps, maybe my constant frustration with Google lately is pushing me to be too dismissive about all of their products. Surely they do great things but I'm not as happy with Google as I used to be.
I find that systems trying to predict my intent are unbearable when they fail, it just feels like trying to interact with a very stupid person.
I think you're right with both points - most technology isn't designed for tech-savvy people like you and me, AND technology that tries to predict human intent is doomed to fail.
When you want build a 'smart' system in the absence of true AI (which does not exist), the only real solution is to build a product for the majority, or support configuration for everyone. The latter seems pretty tough for a search engine. That being said, the advanced search features are just that, an attempt to give the 5% the control they need to do what they want. Whether it works or not is another story.
It doesn't really excuse that the product fails you as a user, but at least it's a reasonable explanation (IMO). As I wrote this, I started thinking about plumbers/electricians going to a hardware store or interacting with electric/plumbing products designed for the general population. I'm sure they feel similar frustrations!
Definitely agree. My experience with Google lately is like this:
- I search for keywords A B C D
- I get 4 irrelevant text ads
- First result is relevant and contains all keywords
- "Other related searches"
- Then a list of results than omit A, B, C or D ("include A?"), or even omit multiple keywords, removing any sense in the query
And the whole time I feel like I'm being pushed around to buy something. It's becoming unbearable. I'm pretty sure Google is optimizing for more ad impressions at this point to burn through adsense credits asap...
This is interesting to me because I've been left with the opposite impression. I've tried several times to switch to an alternative such as Duckduckgo and _always_ end up supplementing it and eventually switching back to Google because the results just aren't what I'm after. It's fine when the answers I want exist on Stackoverflow for example, but anything more esoteric or less specific and I find myself disappointed. I'd love to switch permanently.
I haven't used Google for many years, so I can't speak to whether it shows personalized results today. But, I recently switched to Whoogle Search (https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search) which shows Google results but without the tracking. I am happy with it, that I have completely ditched DuckDuckGo in favor of it.
> returns what it thinks it should interest you, not what you've actually searched for.
It also returns what if thinks google will profit the most from - I’ve noticed a huge uptick in the number of ads which are poor-quality results and usually take both the top 4 and bottom 4 positions on the first page.
Unfortunately can't use it: I'm on my private VPN almost all the time (need it for work). VPN is hosted as OpenVPN service on German Digital Ocean server to have static public IP. The VPN is mine only (sure IP is not), I'm the only person who uses it. Brave Search shows error on accessing: https://ibb.co/72L3mc5 . Other search engines open without problems. Turning off VPN helps, but I don't really understand why my (Digital Ocean's) ip is related to opening the web search page? Even if someone "compromised" that IP - it should not be a stopper to open the search from my point of logical view.
Same here, I’m in Shenzhen using Shadowsocks VPNs and many of my faster exit IPs were being blocked in recent months. Other times there are 5xx errors and when it does work, it’s significantly slower than Google and even DDG, especially on lossy / jittery links.
I really hope they improve the service, I was enjoying it as my default for a while.
I usually can barely browse the internet using VPN through OVS, Digital Ocean, Scaleway and others. All websites assume my traffic is not from a person but from an automated server.
That error looks really generic. It's actively trying to tell humans how to workaround the block, but seemingly without any contextual awareness. It's almost like it's from a "block automated traffic as a service" service. Now I'm curious if there any clues about the provider in the the HTML/CSS/JS of the block page.
Ok, but others are not restricting such behavior, so this one is a restriction for me. They can decide whether traffic is an organic search at least checking if I rush their page with the rate of 100 requests per second or smth similar. For me this is a downside that I'm restricted in usage of "public" resource.
Great! I've recently mentioned that Brave Search is the only alternative search I've stuck to since day 1. Works much better for me than DDG or any other search has ever did.
Not perfect, rarely returns DE results instead of English, but from my point of view they're doing something good and I'm sold.
But please, give me a way to pay for it. I don't want to be the product, one day.
> But please, give me a way to pay for it. I don't want to be the product, one day.
From what I understand, this is already planned.
> Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported. Brave Search will also offer an ad-free Premium version in the near future.
It's not clear whether users are opted-out the data collection by default or if this is something that we need to do manually. Looking at the settings, it looks like everyone is opted-in the data collection, and you have to manually opt-out, which is a nightmare for people like me who delete all browsing history, cookies, and data upon browser exit. I will stick with DuckDuckGo.
This reminds me to uninstall brave. Rebranded chromium with crypto shilling and now "premium search"? They didn't even test DNS with their tor feature, causing identity leaks.
Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled and include the codecs and DRM libs?
Woolyss builds do all that, but there's no fancy single download installer+auto updater. We need just "chromium".
May be tone down your paranoia bit, once I disabled brave rewards, which was offered as a part of installation without any dark pattern I never saw any shilling.
Also what’s wrong with premium search? You expect free things which cost a lot of money, but you must not see Ads?
And Tor themselves wouldn’t recommend any other browser. Tor feature in brave doesn’t seem to be intended for super serious, but a safer VPN like alternative instead of say Express or Nord.
Even that is optional. You are never forced to use any of these features.
I don’t understand the sentiment of everything must be free and open source, when your daily life is not.
At least on Yc backed HN, I wish I see people supporting alternate business models. If it works for them good, else market speaks.
Problem is that "free" is our only option. I would love to pay for search engine that has more configuration options and no ads, I would love to pay for a modern browser (engine) without any tracking and no ads. Reality is that I cannot do that.
Reality is apart from few hundreds may be users, no one wants to pay for stuff.
WhatsApp costed a very nominal amount, No body in India cared until it became entirely free. So much that they favoured it over Indian grown app Hike messenger , which was much better Ux wise.
So you must find a batch of users who are willing to pay, and hire/pay a chromium dev to maintain your code base, or some similar business model. Where the devs don’t expect to become rich based on the project, an their only goal is to maintain a ungoogled chromium. Expecting a corp to do that is a wrong way to look into it.
The right to directly vote for a search engine with actual money is huge, as is the right to withdraw that vote. If Google went this route a few decades ago, their search product (and the Internet as a whole) would likely be in a much, much healthier place today
What ad-supported financing removes, along with other things, is friction. You open google.com for the first time, and you can instantly use it.
Also, Google started in 1998. I don't know whether you remember, but I do: paying for stuff over the internet was pretty hard by then. Paying across national borders was harder still. I wished to pay for several pieces of software by then, but it was hard even if I agreed to walk down to a bank.
Compared to that, selling ads and receiving money from businesses was incomparably easier, for everyone involved. Unlike billing search users, it was a viable business model.
That was back when shareware told you to mail a check. I think "people who forgot" is a smaller set than "people who never knew." It's easy to forget a lot of this forum is people well into adulthood who weren't even alive in the '90s, and people who didn't get online until after the boom of new things built on the discounted ruins of the .com crash.
I've been using Brave on Android for a couple of years now, and it's great!
It asked me once during initial setup if I wanted to use Brave Rewards (or whatever the crypto component is called), I said "no", and it's never bothered me with anything crypto related ever again.
Yeah, I'm honestly flabbergasted that people like using a browser that has the performance of Chromium without the Google, a thorough / very performant ad-blocker built-in, and some totally optional next-gen features that many people like.
There is no "Chromium without the Google". Chromium/Blink is made by Google. By using a browser built on Chromium/Blink, you are actively supporting Google's browser engine hegemony.
The browser is not just the engine and the "browser engine hegemony" is not what really matters.
What matters is that Google does not establish a position where it can use its browser to dictate the direction of the whole web in favor of its business.
Chromium or not, Brave was never forced to adopt the changes in the extension manifest (which would block some ad-blocking and tracking mechanisms). They also never were forced to implement FLOC, they have their own policy regarding third-party cookies, etc, etc.
Sure it would be better if we had diversity and more choices in all different layers, but if you think about it the more companies use Chromium to create browsers that take the web in a different direction from what Google wants, the more Google gets judo-ed out of its dominance.
I think we’ve seen how Google can kneecap it’s open source products with Android, taking more and more portions into closed source. Why won’t they take the same step with chromium if Microsoft edge and Brave become too popular?
In your example, Chrome is to Android as Chromium is to AOSP. They can not close the Chromium parts, much like they can not close the AOSP parts.
Having MS Edge and Brave becoming too popular would be akin to getting LineageOS, /e/OS to mainstream, and it is exactly my point: no matter how much that would be against Google's interests, there is nothing they can do about it.
Lineage and e are both at a disadvantage because of a lack of Google play integration which makes banking apps among others not function. People can hack around this but the OS will never end up mainstream as a result.
To do the same to chromium, all Google would need to do is make YouTube rely on some proprietary DRM that’s not in Chromium and everyone will end up switching back to chrome. Brave isn’t large enough that Google cares to swat them away, but since they control the underlying project they have ways to neuter chromium.
> People can hack around this but the OS will never end up mainstream as a result
Not people. Companies.
Microsoft and Brave are only piggy-backing on Google's resources and manpower. It's not like they can't they do it, it's more of a "why should we try to set sail now while there is a huge transatlantic ship that can carry us?".
If Google starts neutering Chromium, it's on Microsoft, Brave and all other browsers depending on it will pick up the slack.
And if they don't, that's when it makes sense to look for a Chromium-free alternative.
If Mozilla's problems were financial or lack of capacity to get the resources to work on the browser, at least you'd have a point in saying "we need to support the alternatives now". But Mozilla's problems are not financial, they are due to bad leadership. No amount of money thrown their way is going to solve it.
> Brave isn’t large enough that Google cares
Google asked Brave to testify in Congress in their favor, to say that Google is not abusing its dominance on the web. Google can not swat them away.
I'm with you. I check out most brave threads on HN and am always surprised by the level of hatred towards it.
I've been using it for over a year now. It's a good browser and I like the new ideas they come up with. I don't know whether it's going to catch on, but at least someone is thinking outside the box.
The only concerning thing here is the growing belief that one's consumer choices are their "identity", and alternate choices are an attack on that identity. Moreover, that alternative choices must be feigned in bad faith, part of a conspiracy, "fake news", etc.
What happened to you, Internet? Politics is one thing, but this is starting to bleed over into "liking Apple", or "hating Apple", or any similar camp one finds themselves in with a web browser or programming language or other piece of tech. "People who feel differently from me must be faking it as part of a plot." What the hell?
I'd love it if this wasn't political. If Brendan Eich wasn't running Brave, I'd probably trust the browser a whole lot more. Same as how if Apple stopped providing service to China and quit leveraging slave-labor, I'd probably trust their products a lot more too.
How is it political? One of the primary reasons I started using the damn thing is that whatever Eich's politics, they don't seem to affect the product. Vivaldi seems the same, and at least some of their staffers have politics opposite of Eich's. But both teams bring a simple professionalism to work: They all believe in user control and privacy and try to build a good browser on those principles. They're not interested in external political evangelism a la Mozilla, and to me it shows. Even though both of them have the same ethos, the angles they're coming at it are different.
But in the end I can expect both teams to deliver a tool that's built to enable me and my wants, regardless of what our opinions on things outside the browser are. After all, they're irrelevant to the browser. Within the browser space, there are politics, but both orgs' politics are of user control and less tracking and spying.
Does anyone else find the font choice in Brave Search to be an obstacle for them? I just find it so hard to read.
I've set Brave as the default search in my browser (Chrome) in an attempt to give less of my traffic to Google, but most of the time I just get frustrated trying to read the search results and repeat the query in Google Search. I know it's ridiculous that I haven't just switched back to Google. I still want Brave to win, but trying to stay on the Brave page is an actively unpleasant experience. The closest analogy I can think of is that it feels like trying to make myself eat vegetables I hate (which is a poor analogy because I like vegetables!)
If you're using uBlock, you can one-click block remote font loading from a domain in the badge popup menu (or write custom rules using the no-remote-fonts: or *$font syntax). This will force a fallback to system fonts, which should be perfectly fine.
This hardly the "best" solution, but, everyone has uBlock installed, and it's literally a 5-second hack.
Thank you for the feedback, Zestyping. If you wouldn't mind, can you tell me more about what makes the text hard to read? Is it the size, font-face, or color (or a combination of these)?
Pro tip: If you aren't happy with the search results offered in Brave Search, and would prefer Google instead, perform the same search but with !g added to the end
The main problem is that Poppins is a display typeface, not a text typeface. It's not good for large blocks of small type, and in fact as I examine it more closely, it becomes obvious that it's a low-quality design.
- The proportions are distorted, with some letters of excessively varying widths. Capitals like C, D, E, L, G are usually about the same size, but in Poppins, C, G and D are enormous while E and L are too narrow. You can do stuff like this to be cheeky, to have the type draw attention to itself in a display typeface; but a text typeface should aim to be legible, not flashy or distracting.
- Kerning is poor, with big irregular gaps between letters, especially after P and T.
- The lowercase e in particular is a problem. The middle bar is so thin that it almost disappears, and the tail comes so close that it almost closes the circle. You might think that a single letter can't mess up a whole design, but it's the most common letter in the English language. :)
- Hyphens are way off-center and parentheses are too tall, which just looks sloppy.
I discovered that you have entire pages of text set in Poppins on your website; these are actively painful to read! Like, just try to read the entire page and see if your eyes can tolerate reading all the way to the end, or try to count the number of times "search" appears in the text. Poppins has the silly, goofy personality of something for young children; it's hard to take seriously. It's named "Poppins" after all! And with all these quality issues to boot, pages like https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ just look unprofessional.
Do you have a designer on staff? Your designer should be able to explain all this to you and more, and to choose a more legible typeface for your body text. Pick something boring, like the system font on Macs, or Inter, Source Sans, Open Sans, Roboto, etc.
Hope this helps! If you run an A/B test, let me know how it goes.
But if a large amount of users have that issue, that'll cause Brave search to fail. 99%+ of users will never use custom scripts, they'd just use the search engine that works out of the box.
I've been using Brave Browser for almost a year already. I fallback to Chrome when I can't get through some Recaptchas: this is the only annoying thing on Brave, you get a lot of Recaptchas that are invisible on Chrome and some are impossible to solve.
I've also switched to Brave Search immediately when it come out. I'm satisfied with the search results I get for 90% of my queries, switching back to Google for the remaining 10%. My main problems with Brave Search are: 1. It doesn't have good localised results for non-english queries; here Google remains the best; 2. It doesn't have support for verbatim searching
Honest question. I have used DuckDuckGo and Brave Search and although they seem to do the job for generic searches they really suck for very specific searches.
How likely is for one of these search engines to catch-up technologically to Google's sophistication? I really can't see a clear trajectory for them to compete with Google's quality.
on the contrary. for what it's worth, I think google search is finally open to disruption. the tech required to compete with them is finally commoditized enough that it's financially doable, plus, and most importantly, they've screwed up their search results so much now that google search is just not that good anymore.
I also think that they're "too" clever with their search to their detriment. We tend to think in terms of text search and are looking for results that match what we want. I'd prefer not to have a machine assume I actually intended something else. Just give me great text search where I can perform various inclusions/exclusions and you'll win the market
Exactly. If I search for "red car" with quotes, I don't get why I get results about purple wagons.
It's like going to a pub and ordering a steak and getting a burger instead. No, I don't want your damn burger, I am not going to pay for it, I'm just going to try another pub. But wait, there's no pub that delivers what you've actually ordered.
Another hypothetical example that obviously doesn't give you purple wagons anywhere. Why not use a real example? Should be really easy if this is such a widespread problem.
What makes Google a lot more useful than the alternatives is the vast amount of “widgets” they have.
For example when searching for a persons age, in shows up instantly in a large font on top. When searching for “champions league today”, you will get all soccer games for today neatly presented right inside of Google.
I haven’t seen another search engine that makes accessing this type of information this easy to access. And the sheer amount of widgets and engineering power behind them probably makes it harder to catch up to Google for the small players.
DDG also has widgets. But they don't have good localized results. That's where Google really excels. Any non-English search queries are just bad on alternative search engines. Maybe they're impossible to get right if you don't have programmers around the world or there's just no focus on those for the other search engines.
They will never catch up because Google is the only one dedicating enough engineering to match the growing amount of information, and their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results.
There is a growing sentiment, mine included, that Google search isn't getting better. In fact, I feel it's markedly worse for many queries. The problem for me are all the blogspams out there. These -should- be easy to just punt, but alas, they do not. I'd gladly switch to any search that didn't show me such results.
My growing disdain for Google isn’t even about their tech. In the beginning, Google’s SRP was an ad or two, followed by ~10 magically-relevant <a> links. For some years they were praised for a restrained approach.
Today, the SRP is ads, the info box, the Reddit-cluster, the Quora-cluster, images, videos, “people also searched…”, “did you mean…”, and somewhere near the bottom a couple of those good ol’ fashioned links for old time sake.
I share the sentiment. Unfortunately it means other engines struggle even more, because they are all using roughly the same basket of techniques. I’m familiar with the claims that DDG and Brave serve equally good or better results.
An insightful breakthrough in quality that vastly reduces the computing and engineering required to serve great results that keep up with expanding information, similar to what Google did for search 20 years ago, would be wonderful, but it won’t come from DDG or Brave unless they can develop new models that completely replace their current search products.
I don't know if it's really Google getting worse or the web (or perhaps even the world) is getting worse. I have the impression it's more the latter than the former, and suspect other search engines will struggle with blogspam just as much.
I think it's both. Google does seem to editorialize search results but the web's also becoming more obsessed with SEO and some sites are just hard to search, either internally or with an external search engine.
Brave is already comparable in quality to Google IMO, to the point where I maybe go to Google once every couple of weeks, if that. Superior, if you're searching for anything at all "controversial" that Google bans or demotes. And where it knows it's lacking, it gives you the option to mix in Google results if you'd like. I'm very impressed with Brave Search. I'm also disappointed and annoyed that Apple completely controls iOS search engine selection and doesn't allow adding custom search engines at all. Safari is the best mobile browser hands down, except for this "inconvenience". iOS Brave is worse than Safari, at least for me.
What I hate about Brave Search is that their bot disguises as a regular user and they don't publish the IP addresses of their bot. You can't target it through robots.txt and you'll never know if you've blocked one of their IP's by mistake.
Can anyone compare/contrast DuckDuckGo with Brave Search? I use the Brave browser and am a fan, but like many others, I search primarily with DDG, using the occasional g! <search> to see if something developer related shows up better there (I'd say 20%-10% of the time I find additional resources/answers on Google). Does BS have bang codes like DDG?
This is mostly common sense, but it'll be really interesting to see the metrics: People choosing to use the Brave browser should presumably trust Brave as their search as well, especially once the crypto ad scheme ties into their search engine too. This might be a case where most people follow along with the switch.
For all the love DDG gets on this site, it’s not really an independent search engine. It relies heavily on the Bing index, despite spinning it as using it as one of many signals. Brave has its own index and that puts it in another class. In my experience the results have been higher quality, too.
Have you spent much time with Brave Search? I use Firefox and currently have DDD as the default search on my laptop, but I often use the !g operator since the DDD results are routinely not as good as Google. I’ve had a significantly better experience with Brave Search, though. I’ll probably switch my default soon, once I learn the operators that Brave supports.
The bang operators for ddg justify it as my default even knowing that it isn’t very good for some queries. The habit of being able to reroute a search to the engine that will handle it most appropriately is a killer feature. Only drawback is that the redirect can take an extra few seconds sometimes.
It’s hard to imagine replacing it. If Brave search becomes excellent then I can just use the bang for it.
What wrong if they’re trying to find more money while providing privacy?
Would you rather have a browser from rich monopoly like google? Or an alternative thats self sustainable with its own money?
Of course it does. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and companies have to make money. One of the best things about Brave is that it's aggressively trying to build independent revenue streams and a footprint on the net. A company with solid, diverse, independent sources of revenue is much better positioned to keep making independent decisions.
How decent is Brave as a browser? I've been very hesitant on it as a primary browser due to them starting up their own cryptocurrency (BAT), adding automatic affiliate cryptocurrency links in pages, and a history of serving their own ads on top of others.
It's essentially stock Chromium with a bunch of tinfoil on top. This means good Chromium UI things like tab groups, which are a digital form of meth.
They have a built-in adblocker (not an extension, a modification of the browser itself so it doesn't care about Manifest v3. It can also do CNAME uncloaking, which is what makes uBO better on Firefox than Chromium), a lot of anti-tracking features.
Importantly, they maintain their own end to end encrypted sync architecture like Mozilla does.
They have miscellaneous sideshow features like a torrent client and a Tor implementation (but AFAIK recommend the Tor Browser still)
A big thing is that the adblocker is that it's there on mobile. They're also the only mobile Chromium browser that can play YouTube videos in the background as far as I know.
As far as the crypto goes, it's actually a decent system:
Brave sells adspace (which they deliver as new tab backgrounds and toaster popups, entirely separately from websites), gets paid in Money™. They keep a cut, take the rest and buy BAT with it, give it to users. They have a tipping system where users can then tip content creators with the BAT and get creators some compensation for Brave's part in killing tracking ads.
(this can never be a full compensation, since Brave's ads don't track, and should thus be less valuable than evil ads)
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If you want bigtime UI innovation, I'd look elsewhere - Brave's angle is stock Chromium, privacy, and standalone infrastructure to provide independent revenue. The big UI innovators in Chromium land are Microsoft (if you don't care about privacy, Edge is sadly a disaster on that front) and Vivaldi (who are also very no tracky and run their own end to end encrypted sync service. Both have a lot of fantastic UI customization features. Microsoft's more well-designed ones that are both pleb friendly and powerful, Vivaldi's more of the "here's all the toggles" type. To illustrate their type of overkill, they have THREE separate tab group implementations built in. And a mail client, calendar, RSS reader, a barebones notes module - did I mention these guys used to make Opera?
As decent as any Chromium fork with built in ad/tracker blocker can be. The cryptocurrency is opt-in, the only affiliates I know of are in their start page widgets, and their ads don't sit on top of others, they're opt-in notifications.
You can disable the cryptocurrency stuff and if you're worried about ads you could install whatever ad blocker youre currently using. Underneath everything it's just Chromium. I've been using it for a year or so.
We launched tipping with Bitcoin, but had to pivot when network fees and congestion were unbearable (our users would buy $5 at a time, pay nearly as much in fees, and wait for what seemed like an eternity to receive their funds). BAT (ERC-20) offered immediate relief.
Brave has never added affiliate links into pages.
Brave has never served its own ads on top of others'.
Just use Ungoogled Chromium. I'm also the kind of person who's made uneasy by crypto involvement, and Brave's developers have lambasted me in the past for asking why such a ridiculous feature needs to exist in the first place.
Oh, and 30% of your Basic Attention Tokens go straight to lining Brendan Eich's wallet. I'll just browse on my own, thank you...
Here it seems you mean I personally get 30% of gross ad revenue (below you seemed to say I got 30% of all BAT; false also). No, the 30% goes to the company, commissions and costs come out of it, and I get nothing directly tied to it. I get a lower-six-figure salary. Smearing me on false information is a bad look. Doing it again would be lying. Knock it off.
Great, the browser that was supposed to take a stand against Google only managed to cave in to their exact monetization scheme. Somehow I'm not surprised by the fact that you have nothing better to do than respond to Hacker News comments.
No, Brave's opt-in and private/anonymous ad system is not "their exact monetization scheme". Saying it is the same just parades your ignorance or dishonesty. Which is it?
"brave aquires search company" - 4th SERP is accurate [1]. Not to shabby! 100% of results from Brave index.
Congrats to Cliqz team.
It is a shame that Brave / Cliqz couldn't work with DuckDuckGo to help them get onto an independent index, assuming they would want that, instead of competing. I think there was already a lot of overlap in customer mindshare.
I've been using Brave for a few years now in combination with ublock origin - as Brave just does not block everything that's annoying. I use duckduckgo and don't see a need to switch to Brave search.
I primarily like the Brave sync feature, and it's actually the second main reason I recommend using Brave these days. It was quite junky when it was first released but by now it works like a charm for my 6 devices.
I've tried their search, it was ok, but my brain would get so stressed when not finding right info and would blame brave instead...
Do they have a shortcut/hotkey for quickly switching to google (and other engines)?
The other problem with Brave is that crypto token integration in everywhere which feels more dystopian than Google's data gathering. And let's be honest - memory use after few days is same as Chrome's.
I use DDG on desktop but on mobile they are unusable. Their app displays three ads out of 4 results in a page. A simple typo gives me completely different results.
I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all.
About the tracking part, you may like to check Whoogle Search - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search It's Google results without the tracking, and it can be self-hosted.
> I will continue to hope there is some kind of subscription to Google search without tracking and all.
This would be ideal as Google Search has the best results for me. But I don't see it ever happening.
Although I'm sure many people would pay, it'd be a drop in the ocean compared to all people that wouldn't (and hard to justify dedicating resources to it when you're already making tons of money with the ad-supported free version).
Just tried it out. Looks nice (except for that unremovable crypto button on the toolbar), but I need SpeechSynthesis (TTS) support. Will stay with FF and use MS Edge for its excellent TTS.
The search engine is pretty weak judging from my initial queries.
Programming and code-related queries are definitely challenging. That being said, when we can improve (and there are definitely many opportunities to do so) we'd appreciate if you clicked the 'Feedback' link at the top of the results, and let us know what was off about the entries returned. Also, consider checking out Fallback Mixing (https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback) and the Web Discovery Project (https://brave.com/privacy/browser/#web-discovery-project) for more on how we are working to improve Brave Search more efficiently.
Between Google and Brave I prefer using Brave, but am I the only one bothered that this move is an abuse of power of a company that has both a browser and a search engine? We all know where this leads to.
On new android devices in Europe, google was forced to let users select their preferred search engine from a randomized list of the 5-6 most popular options in that country. This could definitely come to browsers at some point. But then it's probably a death sentence to Firefox who needs to set Google as its search provider to survive.
The point of BAT is not to get money for yourself, but to be able to tip creators. Individual ad viewers aren't terribly valuable (and Brave ads not being evil makes them less valuable), and only matter as a mass. You'll get a bit of pocket money, but as they aggregate on creators' end, that can compensate for losing revenue from evil ads getting blocked.
The purpose of BAT is funding Brave development, which is why Brendan Eich personally claims 30% of the currency ever minted. It's a joke along the same lines as Tether or Bingus Token in the world of DeFi.
A stupid pair of assertions, given etherscan.io exists and shows all flows from creation of BAT on. I don’t have and have never had 30%, nor has Brave ever sold BAT to pay for development or anything else.
Still, Google owns everything in terms of search engines. You can't probably deny that, but it's a big prop to Brave for creating their unique search engine.
ive been using brave search since release. i switched from DDG which was working for me. brave works for most of my purposes but when it doesn't the option to "anonymously gather google results" makes me feel like I'm never missing out
would be nice if you would display the number of results, this is a very helpful feature to me at least. I use it often to check if a phrase is grammatically correct or if one term is more popular than the other etc.
Joe Rogan mentioned on his show past week that he stopped using google search as well. Joe is convinced google is censoring results on covid, because he kept getting back official sources (benefits of the vaccine), when he was searching the opposite. Keyword searches for specific articles failed to return results.
He now questions what else google is censoring.
Agree with Joe too. It's like when you order a steak, and ask for a knife, and the waiter brings you back a spoon for you own safety. I would get pretty annoyed.
Brave never redirected users to referral links. We did have a bit of mistaken behavior in the browser's suggestion list. We offered affiliate codes as a way to support Brave development. If a user typed in a matching search term (e.g. Binance), our suggestion list would offer the affiliate link for the Binance site. This feature was intended for search input, but mistakenly matched fully-qualified URLs too (e.g. binance.us). We shipped a fix quickly, and turned the feature off by default. You can read more about that here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
Brave browser does not block first-party ads by default so it should not be contradictory. If a user decides to enable aggressive mode of Shield then fist-party ads are blocked as well.
I usually use something like "My Public IPv4 is" to see what IP address is in the index to derive what provider a search engine is using.
However, Brave Search apparently does not even allow hard quotes and gives me random stuff related to IPv4. People keep saying that Google doesn't respect what you enter but for this query Google is the only one respecting it. DDG starts out with a few results matching it exactly but then goes off the rails with random results.
I’m still rooting for them, but in general I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results on Google, DDG and now Brave. I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).