Index other search engines

Browser Support Mobile Support
1

Description of the issue:

About the time that Brave Search was introduced, the ability to “Automatically index websites that follow the OpenSearch spec.” on Android has been removed.

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Visit ‘google.co.za’ or any regional Google search site, enter a search item, then navigate to ‘Manage Search Engines’. That search engine does not appear.

Expected result:

The search engine should be listed.

Brave Version( check About Brave):

Version 1.31.91

Mobile Device details

Redmi Note 8

Additional Information:

2

Oh, crap, that’s what I feared. Is this going to be reverted, sooner or later? I left Vivaldi specifically because it doesn’t allow custom search engines on Android. I’m, struggling hard to get my personal Searx instance to work with Brave on Android…

3

I found a helpful explanation on github that details what the setting Index Other Search Engines does, along with some changes that made this option disabled by default on desktop.

Here is the description of issue 14496:

Description

As I browse, additional entries are silently inserted into Other search engines periodically. There is no notice that I can see. As far as I can tell, I have no opportunity to consent to this settings manipulation. As a user, even after reasonable inquiry, I have no idea that this is happening, much less how, or how to stop it.

Users should be empowered to turn this off, and I would argue it should be off by default. I should not have to manually and continually poll brave://settings/searchEngines to “discover” new or reappearing entires only to have to manually remove (and re-remove) them.

Looks like these changes were released in September.

I did not see anything about this for mobile, though I did not look for it specifically.
For both of you, @RonaldorgZA and @Anion , are you interested in mobile or desktop?

desktop changelog entry

issue with discussion about the setting

Hope this helps!

4

My issue is on mobile. Custom search engines on desktop work beautifully.
BTW, I have opened a similar topic here:

And also raised an issue on github:

5

Hello dabat,

I did not see anything about this for mobile, though I did not look for it specifically.
For both of you, @RonaldorgZA and @Anion , are you interested in mobile or desktop?

I raised this as a topic on Android; the desktop version is fine. Your links to issue 14496 all relate to the desktop verson.

I placed a comment on GitHub so let’s hope some sense is made of this in which an option is placed in the Android version to enable Index other search engines.

In the meantime, I am using Kiwi browser because it uses OpenSearch and allows an ad blocking extension–in my instance, uBlock Origin.

6

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