Brave Search leaves beta, offers Goggles for filtering, personalizing results Brave Software, maker of a privacy-oriented browser, on Wednesday said its surging search service has exited beta testing while its Goggles search personalization system has entered beta testing. Brave Search, which debuted a year ago, has received 2.5 billion search queries since then, apparently, and based on current monthly …
I'm not sure I really see the use case here. Surely what one wants when one searches is that for which one searched... for example, when I search for 'the register' (on DDG) the register front page is the first hit, and almost everything else on the first results page points at vulture central. I don't see how one would change the relevance of that.
I can certainly see the utility of getting rid of clone answer pages - they're only there to benefit from the users of an authoritative site and they sooner they disappear, the better.
But I can't help feeling that a more focused search engine - particularly one in which I can exclude things easily - would be more helpful. I don't think I really want a thousand pages of advertising links (which I'm going to block anyway) while I'm trying to find substitutes for electronic parts, or how loud a sparrow is in dBA (the internet is really failing me on this last one!).
While I haven't yet used the Brave search engine, I can see a case for boosting certain results. For example, when I type "assembly" into a search engine, the vast majority of the time I'm looking for something related to 'assembly language programming' rather than anything to do with physical construction or putting together Ikea products.
I browse with javascript disabled. There are certain javascript only sites like pinterest that litter search results and it would be handy to exclude them with a configuration file. I will give brave search a try and take a decision later.
I think goggle is a really stupid name for this product. If their target audience misreads the name as intended it will drive them away. Duckduckgo may not be the most intuitive name but at least it is imaginative.
Google used to have the ability to ignore a list of sites about 15 years ago. I had a ton listed, then one day the feature just vanished.
Similarly, Maps used to have an "avoid area" where you could select a rectangle that it wouldn't route through. I'm sorely wishing for this because they've removed the traffic signals at a popular intersection a couple blocks away.
Pretty much any site that invests heavily in SEO would be a great candidate to filter out, and I can see that adding value.
It's actually interesting that Google appears to have half given up that battle, since it used to be one of their engineering activities in search (filtering out low-quality content trying to game the system).
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