Brave releases its Search API, bringing independence to the search landscape | Hacker News Reader

Brave releases its Search API, bringing independence to the search landscape

brave.com

95 pointsfariszr11 comments

I am a Kagi user, but Brave Search is my fallback.

I haven't used Google in 3 years I reckon, except when iOS forces me there when I look up a term. In fact, I try it every blue moon and I am surprised how bad it has become. Most of the results are spam, there's ads, and useless stuff mixed in. Let alone the rudeness to completely disregard my search terms because it bloody knows better, and tries to interpret my instructions. Alternative search engines improved in the past couple years, but Google Search has turned to shit, making any competition look better as a result.

Hopefully the Kagi team integrates this API together with their use of Google and Bing. Brave has an independent index, and my dislike of Microsoft and Google is so great these days I want to see someone take them down a notch or two.

Brave Search is getting better and better. 2 years and hasn't let me down yet.

From constantly using !g on DDG to not using Google at all has been a massive improvement for me.

I wonder if switching to this would bring back the nuked DDG search facets (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683254)

We didn't nuke them, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35691426 (from that thread).

Thanks for the update, and for mostly putting the docs back in place. I would argue that instead of hiding the "we're experiencing issues" in the search syntax page, instead if one includes an advanced, but inoperative, facet (such as the one I stepped on `-inurl:`) then it would be stellar to include "hey, watch our /updates page for more info on how we are working to fix that term that we just ignored"

It looks like there's even precedent for such a "toast" given that the use of `site:` triggers the info box "Only showing results from"

I've used Brave for about 2 years, but then, about 1 year ago, I went back to Firefox.

Firefox cleaned up their act on MacOS, and had 2 things Brave doesn't: vertical tabs and, bypassing those annoying warnings on insecure web pages and allowing to store their passwords (I deploy services at work and home and don't want to be constantly reminded that's an insecure web page, having accept warnings and fill out passwords manually).

Brave is trying for more than 1 year now to get vertical tabs. Before that, they were trying for more than 1 year to get sync working properly.

Brave does bring some very interesting ideas to the browser space, but seems like their priorities are skewed. The usability for the end user of their browser, always comes as a distant second thought for them, and they are losing market because of it.

The announcement is about their search service, not their browser.

The API looks promising but I find it quite expensive.

Unfortunately search is prohibitly expensive! This is however still much cheaper than Kagi's or Bing's search API.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html

For the free tier, Brave is 1tps capped at 2000/month. Bing is 3tps capped at 1000/month. Kagi is 100 searches total.

Not sure what you mean by "quite" expensive? If you are comparing to other services like Google, then of course Google's privacy cost is many orders of magnitude greater than free.

Developing an independent search infrastructure takes considerable resources, so these prices are not necessarily expensive. We can confirm this, as Mojeek crawls, indexes and ranks independently of any other search engine. We also have an API and have been providing search without tracking for over 16 years.

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