I, like many people, am not happy about the change of Brave Search’s image searching. The excuse of “Brave will protect you from their tracking” is not a good one, because it’s not just embedded trackers that makes us want to ditch those engines. Honestly, I’m quite baffled that Brave chose those two as the options.
I would like to suggest changing the image search options from Google/Bing to Startpage/DuckDuckGo instead. While I think Brave Search is the superior search engine to both, if you can’t have your own image searching option, at least give us quick access to more private options. I utterly refuse to use Google or Bing directly nowadays; if I need their results, I just go to Startpage and DDG respectively, since they’re both like private proxies for those two search engines.
If Brave Search won’t have its own image searching for a while, adding Startpage and DDG is the only way forward in my book. Right now, I still try to search for images on Brave Search and then stop in my tracks realizing I have to switch over to those two instead. It’s a waste of time that I really am not enjoying at all.
I would have preferred you to work on creating embedded image search instead of AI-related stuff. Summarizer is a useful tool but it’s one I could have lived without; image search, on the other hand, is not something I can live without.
Glad to see so many people are in favor of this. It really is the only way forward for Brave Search, in my opinion. The fact that they didn’t think to do this from the start concerns me, because it really is the no-brainer solution if they can’t add image searching of their own.
Just a FYI. We talked about this on the Community Call and they said there’s a lot of things that are a work in progress and they are hearing suggestions. Luke also mentioned that they are aware some explanations should be given.
All of that said, we didn’t go in-depth on it and I’m not 100% sure what’s going on. I’ve tried contacting Jan, who I believe is the Product Manager for Brave Search (I might be wrong on title). So far he hasn’t been responding. If you guys want, you can try to tag him in on Twitter at @janypiotrowski.
Thanks for clueing us in on that, I appreciate it. I would definitely appreciate a full explanation from Brave themselves; I’m a lot more forgiving of things I disagree with if the company gives a fair, well-thought-out explanation of their intentions and their understanding of our feedback.
The problem I see is that when I search for images on Brave Search, the links just take me straight to those engines, so I’m not sure how they’re processing it through Brave in a privacy-preserving way, especially since both Google and Bing record searches in general (which could be problematic if you have accounts signed in on either, unless they’ve implemented Firefox-style containers). It really doesn’t make sense to me why they wouldn’t just redirect to Startpage/DDG if they are going to redirect.
If you do want to listen/watch the rest of the call, you’ll see where they teased out some changes they are making to Brave Talk. They are building out features for Web 3, such as token gating where you can set it that only people with particular NFT or whatever will be able to join the call or where you can set certain tokens to automatically grant moderator privileges and all. But also revealed plan on building it out further here in the future so can do a lot more. Honestly, that was pretty much the entire call overall.
As to the Search working as I was saying, I think they said it’s because it processes through their servers. It’s just using API to populate the information but it’s staying on Brave Search itself. This might be a bad example I’m given, but I think it might be appropriate to suggest it’s kind of like how a proxy works where it’s going through a middle man, so to speak. At least I’m pretty sure that’s how it was being explained.
I’m not sure how it could be working through Brave Search since it takes me directly to Bing and Google’s sites but thanks for the video, I will definitely take a look!
Ah, just tried listening in and it wasn’t in recording. So either it was in conversation beforehand or somehow I’m getting something mixed up. I’ll have to look more later and see if I can figure it where things got said wrong. It may also be that was one of the things suggested rather than what is being done. Just checked and see you’re right that it’s just sending over to site. I’ll edit other comment when I get up in the morning.
So much for “privacy” when they literally send you to Google or Bing, the biggest offender of privacy.
Additionally, when watching YouTube video on brave, it plays ads now. I think I will switch back to Firefox until they fix this mess.
Seemed pretty clear to me that this is a sponsored thing, or at the very least they’re stuck in the early 2000s and haha Google cool? But more likely a sponsored thing.
I agree. I don’t mind using Google for image/video search, but I understand why you don’t like to use it since it is bad for privacy. It would be great if brave added DDG or startpage for image/video search. It would be even better if they added their own search option. It would be neat though if they added duckduckgo, startpage, and qwant for searching options.
Which is worrisome if that’s the case, considering the fact that Brave built itself on privacy. I know they’re diving into the Web3 thing, and I’m completely cool with that, but privacy needs to be the main focus. You can’t have Web3 without privacy anyways.
Exactly. I’ve de-Googled my life so I don’t want to have to go back. I’m also not about to start supporting Microsoft through Bing, especially with their reckless dive into AI. Brave Search is truly independent now, and that’s what I appreciated; plus, their focus on AI is far more careful and will hopefully keep people from being too dependent on it.
I fully agree!! I am seriously thinking of leaving Brave. It has changed over the years …