Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

Here’s something else — the most critical part of a booking — the booking itself. Go talk to third party aggregator chat bot when you realise you don’t even have a booking that you booked.

4-5 days later if you’re lucky you’ll receive an apology email if you’re lucky, which mentions that they do not want you have that experience and they’ve send it for feedback to the relevant team.

I rarely book hotels via third party aggregators now. Either direct or I use my employee’s travel assistance parter portal where I have same protections as my work travel just that I’ll have to pay from my pockets.

In the boutique + arbitrary case, what you want is to talk to a real person, explain your issue, and get some kind of free-text note added to your booking in a way that staff will actually follow the instructions in it. You also want this to potentially increase the cost of your stay (rather than your request being denied on the basis that such a modification would increase the cost of your stay.)

If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the booking agent to make such a modification, they will have no ability to add the note to your booking in the hotel's computer in such a way that the staff will take it seriously; nor even, necessarily, the ability to confirm that that modification is something that the hotel can do for you. (They can call the hotel... but they're just as likely to be brushed off as you are.)

If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the hotel, they will tell you that they can't help you, because they want to charge you more, but they don't have the ability to charge you anything, since they're not billing you; they're billing the booking agency. And the booking agency itself has no way for a hotel to add an SKU for this kind of customization. (If it did, it'd be abused by unscrupulous hotels.) They'll then tell you that they can fix your problem if they cancel your agency booking and then re-book it through the hotel itself... but in so doing, you might not be able to keep your reservation.

If you book through the hotel, you can just speak with the hotel, and enter into whatever private direct customer-to-business deals you like with them to negotiate whatever kind of special service you want from them.

By booking with the actual hotel's web site, you at least know you have a room. If the price of that certainty is a little bit of extra UX friction (or making a phone call, which I'll soon be able to delegate to an AI anyway), that sounds just fine.

Since then I book directly. Most recently I booked a hotel which had 2+1 night free. Booking.com was offering full price for 3 nights stay.

If call them on the phone that implies one can speak the language. If hotel has a website that suggests it has an email address. Not sure I would want to stay at a hotel with a broken website and no email address.

I've never had problems booking through an intermediary but the parent is correct to the extent there are some benefits to dealing directly with the hotel.

It's really sad that so-called "tech" companies and internet marketing companies have bought out the independent travel guides, took the data and made it unreasonably difficult to find the contact info for hotels online.

But we can always find the contact info in Google Maps. Frommers and Zagat both acquired and pilfered by Google. Very sad.

Here is a website that will provide the website address and the email address for each hotel.

https://www.travelweekly.com/Hotels/

With restaurants I try to not use aggregators like doordash or Uber Eats and always make sure to call and order directly so they save on fees. But hotels seem like they would rather pay the fee rather than give a real customer the best available price and keep a larger portion of the profit.

There are many things I hate about Booking.com, but at least they do generally give the best price.

On top of that, I hate their UX.

My first go-to is Hotel Tonight mobile, which shows how interfaces should be handled. It doesn't handle rebookings and room selections though, so I often book through a given hotel directly - usually better interfaces than booking - even if not standarised, and I had a better treatment at least once, because I booked directly.

Also, if I type in a hotel name, I want to go to the hotel website, not a middleman. Hotel's website is a proxy of hotel quality to some extent.

Sometimes the person on the phone suggests the website to me, but if I decline with a "well.. I'm not very good with websites" excuse [which is effectively true, given the above] they're almost always happy to handle the problem for me.

I can think of no valid reason why a (supposedly privacy-respecting) email relay service should require a browser extension to be installed.

This made me realize DuckDuckGo may not actually value privacy. I stopped trusting all of its services.

It's even more difficult when trying to find the official site for a business I'm unfamiliar with.

DDG and Bing (no surprise there) fails at it too, but Google actually works.

Edit: I didn't mean this to be an insult, I pay for Kagi and use it exclusively. But actually, the Kagi and Google first page of results look fairly different for this query, so Kagi is doing more curation and ordering than I realized.

Also, I assume there is less probability of errors since when you reserve on a travel agent website, your reservation goes through an additional system before it gets to the hotel.

One can question the wisdom of these decisions - but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship.

There are many browsers out there, maintained by a few devs, sometimes in their free time.

Konqueror, Gnome Web, qutebrowser, WebPositive...

Whatever the SerinityOS is doing, reimplementing a browser engine from scratch for their browser Ladybird [1], is vastly more impressive.

[1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird

In fact, back when I used DDG I think I fell back to marginalia more often than I fell back to Google, partly because of my dislike for Google and partly because Google doesn't respect my queries - which of course is a contributing reason for my dislike for them.

Let's say 100 of the Brave employees are engineers and 50 of them work on the Chromium skin, that still leaves 50 to work on search and related efforts. If 5 of them are as good as the marginalia guy and they are allowed to work with equally clear direction, lack of interruptions and more funding, I think that could almost explain a working search engine.

Remember: In the first 20 years of Google existence (or in any 20 years of the semiconductor age until recently) Moores law had over 13 cycles. A lot of what used to be hard problems before isn't anynore.

Does it block ads?

Oh. You didn't? Then what are you complaining about?

I get that you hate Mozilla, but from the perspective of an end user of browsers, this is a deeply irrational position. Less competition in the browser space is uniformly bad for end users, as we've seen very clearly in the past.

It's more surprising that Mozilla survives at all (and likely at Google's mercy with default placement payment) since the only other browsers who can hope to compete have massive subsidies from a larger business.

Firefox on desktop has been more than good enough anyway.

Let's not go this far. Mozilla getting its shit together will only benefit us.

It seems we're all relying on Apple/Safari to provide that Chromium alternative.

Regarding iOS, it's entirely possible there's a bug in our code. I'll definitely take a closer look and speak with the team regarding this report. That said, it's also not entirely uncommon for users to enter a site through a slightly different URL, or form, which complicates the credential-autofill logic. If you have an example or two of sites where this behavior is consistently observed, that would be much appreciated.

Vivaldi's fine, and it's what I'd use if Brave didn't exist, but I just like the experience of using Brave more, especially on desktop. Vivaldi's new mobile version, from what I've seen, has clarified their old mobile UI a lot and got background media playback, so that's less of an issue.

But I still really miss Opera from the old days. Vivaldi is the next best thing.

I get that but if it's a new site, the number of people visiting will be extremely small if not non-existent. The possibilities that I see are

a) The new website is first noted on something like social media and you found it from there and then accessed it via Brave browser

b) You use Google search or Bing within Brave browser and you find the site (because it was submitted to Google or Bing)

The search engine itself shows keyword based ads on search results pages, and Brave offers a $3/mo subscription for ad-free search.

Kudos if you can find their 2023 crawler in logs....

But do not take a random HN commenter's word for it. Try this yourself. Try to map IP addresses to domain names on a very large sample. I have tested this on hundreds of thousands of domains. It will not work reliably. Not even close. Compared to SNI, which is both simple and reliable, it is a total PITA.

If this 1-to-1 IP to domain mapping and 100% reliable reverse DNS idea made any sense, then why claim encrypted DNS offers "DNS privacy". Anyone can see IP addresses on the wire. If all IP addresses can easily be mapped to domain names, then how would this provide any privacy.

Mapping IP addresses to domain names has to account for the fact that IP addresses can change. To make sure the mapping is correct one has to constantly keep doing lookups. SNI stays the same even if the IP changes. It requires very little effort; it makes the process of determining the domain name trivial.

The goal is not total privacy. (Impossible when using the internet anyway.) The goal is to not to make surveillance easy. That's what SNI does. It makes surveillance (and censorship) super easy.

If I am wrong about this, and SNI is AOK, then why was ESNi developed and why is ECH being developed. It is not an easy problem to solve. Why bother. SNI was a feature to benefit websites, not website users. It has some very undesirable properties for users.

Even with CDNs that need to use SNI, it is still possible to avoid sending the domain name in plaintext on the wire. One can use a dummy name, i.e., not the name in the Host header, as the SNI and the CDN can still return the correct page because it uses only the Host header. This was nicknamed "domain fronting". I was using this technique before anyone started calling it that. Using a dummy name can reduce the surveillance value of SNI, sometimes to zero. After some "security researchers" started bragging about their discovery of "domain fronting", AWS and other CDNs started checking SNI against Host header to make sure they are the same. Now "domain fronting" no longer works. Countries that censor the internet, who are valued AWS customers, rely on accurate SNI in order to carry out censorship. Go figure.