It should go without saying, but I’d bet most Brave users are at least somewhat privacy-conscious. Personally, I set cookies to clear every time I close the browser. With Brave Search, this has always been an issue, because my settings can never be saved. Until recently, I was able to tolerate it, but with the addition of AI, I have to say that it has become unbearably painful to use. The simple solution to this is to allow settings to be included in the URL, which can then be added as a search engine. Then, every time you search for something, your settings are saved regardless of whether you save cookies or not.
There was a post about this in the past made 2 years ago and it never got any response from Brave. The reason I’m making this post is so that it shows up under the Brave Search Feedback category with the applicable tags. I’m surely not the only user who clears cookies on exit and would like to use custom settings for Brave Search.
I am having same issue. Settings not being saved. Top issues
-Upon exit delete cookies, browsing history, etc - setting not being saved
-Turn off Leo not being saved
-Turn off AI summarizer not being saved
-Turn off LLM not being saved Additional issues
-Open new tab and settings not saved from first tab
-If I open Brave browser again the settings default to opt in
They definitely can! All of Brave Search’s major privacy-respecting competitors support this feature, including DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and SearXNG. It seems that DuckDuckGo’s implementation is best because it looks like you can set your preferences as your search engine, whereas Startpage and SearXNG seem to require you to visit the URL as a web page first to load your settings.
In any case, all of their competitors support this feature in some form. Unfortunately, even though I prefer Brave Search over the alternatives, Brave AI has made it so unusable that I’ll need to switch to their competitors until they add this feature.
I found out that using the country URL param with a country code or all works but not for all queries. Queries that have nothing to do with a location work perfectly fine but for local queries it takes your ip location into account. For example, a search for paris weather with country=us works even if your ip is in the US. However, if your ip is french, changing country doesn’t work, it will still show you french results.
This is good enough for most queries though as those kinds of queries are rare.
I tried other params such as ai=disabled, ai=false, ai=0, same with summary, safe_search, safe, theme, but nothing worked unfortunately.
If anyone else discovers other params that work please let me know!
I’m frustrated as I set my locality, country (Australia) etc for a search but when Brave is closed or does an update it reverts back to the US. Why can’t it save our settings? Is there a way to do so?! I’ve searched in many posts but can’t find how to do so. I also find results are very poor for Aust, Mr ‘Google’ brings up heaps more… but I don’t want to go there. Startpage is also somewhat better. Does anyone have any answers at all?
Does anyone have any answers at all?