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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

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charcircuit

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Brave gives me the wrong answer that is outdated by like 2 years.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.

View on HN

Here is one example in Brave's favour, seach: politics influences the science of covid-19

Brave - first result.

Google - no first page, no second page, no third page, stopped checking.

Let's try that in quotes - it's the exact title of the article: "politics influences the science of covid-19"

Brave: first result

Google: no results found, searching without quotes.

Are you looking for the article on scienceblog or here on HN? Those are the first two results I get from Google when using the quoted string.

Google, when used with double quotes and exact title, finds aggregator sites, but I was simulating looking for the original: https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/07/08/politics-i...

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.

None of your examples do what you say for me. I see everything on Google including your comments here.

Interesting, let me share two screenshots of what I see:

1. http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/google_example1.png

2. http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/google_example2.png

Do you get a Josh Mitteldorf scienceblog result for the search (no quotes): weight and aging a paradox part 1

It’s the first result for me with or without quotes. I’m curious if the site is somehow blocked.

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.

And perhaps only for some users. Can’t help but wonder if location has some effect.

Weird, the first example appears nowhere in my first three pages of my Google results, but the Ten Elements one is result #1.

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.

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.

I agree that the quality isn't comparable yet, but don't forget that this is barely out of beta and that google had decades to imprpve their product.

"Google" "private"; unbelievable someone can put these two words in same sentence. Google cannot even pull pages older than 10yrs old at the moment.

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.

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