I found instructions online for disabling safe search. Click the hamburger menu, go to settings, set safe search from moderate to off. Save and exit. Done.
Closed the browser, sat for five seconds, opened it up. Safe search is still off. Great!
So I thought. Powered off computer at end of day. Next day, powered on. Opened Brave to search for a local business. Safe search was set to moderate, again. Repeated steps above. Again, closed browser, opened browser, safe search is off.
For now. I have a feeling that when I power on, tomorrow, and do a search that the safe search will be back to moderate.
Am I doing something incorrectly?
CC
Didn’t even last an hour. Did not power off computer. Opened Brave about 15 minutes after I last “saved” my settings. Did a search. This was at the top:
Why isn’t this saving, after I click the “Save and exit” button?
Thank you for your time and consideration.
CC
@Capsaicin_Commando there’s no associated account and it’s all saved in session cookies. If you’re doing something to clear out those cookies, then you’ll have your issue. I hadn’t used Brave Search in a while but when I go, it’s still maintaining the setting.
Let me ask, are you doing anything like clearing cookies on exit or have the toggle for Forget me when I close this site enabled?
Hello, @Saoiray.
Thank you for your reply.
Normally, I do have those settings to clear everything on exit. I have not yet gotten around to doing that. So, as of this moment, those settings are off. I’ll get around to setting those, soon. But the settings are cleared, nonetheless. Not immediately, as noted earlier when I closed the browser for five seconds and re-opened. In that instance, the settings stayed in place.
In this era of more people expecting privacy while surfing the web (as evidenced by the plethora of VPN services, et al), I’m surprised that any browser is saving settings as cookies, or session cookies. I’ve been clearing data on browser exit almost ever since that option became available in browsers.
It would make more sense to save browser settings like this in some part of the browser (like a .dat, .json, or .db file), or some kind of system registry. Heck, even make it human readable and store them in a .txt file, for editing outside of browser settings panel. That way, the settings could be saved without need of any kind of account.
Anyway.. off my soapbox. 
CC
PS: I just realized.. I should have posted this in the duckduckgo forum. (facepalm) It’s been a long day.
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Yeah, this is it can take a few seconds even after we close for it to “trigger” that it’s been closed and to clear out. About that 5 seconds is what I think they said it could take, give or take. Otherwise it has some background processes that might be running. This is especially true for Forget me when I close this site in the Shields settings.
Not browser, but websites. So yeah, was more or less a reference to Brave Search. They don’t have an account associated and don’t keep data. So it just is local settings as put within the session cookies. If/when cleared, all changes also get cleared back to default. Again, because it’s site settings and not browser settings or anything.
Haha, all good. It might be the same answer for them as well though. I mean, I see similar conversation in places like https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1cn9aso/duckduckgo_keeps_forgetting_my_settings/
It took some playing around, but I think I finally found a solution to my issue. I had to do this three times before it actually took.
Went into Settings > Search engine, chose Manage search engines and site search
Added a new engine, called it DuckDuckGo, gave it a shortcut of :ddgs, and gave it a url of
https://duckduckgo.com/?kp=-2&q=%s and saved it, then made it the default.
Now, when I do a search in the URL field for, let’s say, “this is a test”, the URL shows as:
https followed by a colon and slash slash duckduckgo dot com ?kp=-2 & q=this+is+a+test followed by &ia=web
I’ve closed the browser twice, let it sit for 30 seconds, re-opened, did a search from the URL field, and so far it’s staying that way. No more Safe search: moderate in the display.
I hope this helps someone else!
CC
PS: I would post this in the DuckDuckGo forums, but they are using reddit for their forums, and I deleted my reddit account because they shadowbanned me and never explained why. I gave them a week to respond.. got nothing but crickets. So.. hopefully this post appears in site searches.
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