Description of the issue:
I understand that search engines have “did you mean…” suggestions, as well as algorithms that rank search results based on various factors, but I find that Brave Search does organizations a bad deed by putting them low down on a results page even when people search for the EXACT NAME of their organization. I’ll give you an example: If you search for the term American Diabetes Society, what comes up first instead is the American Diabetes Association with the American Diabetes Society relegated to a lower position in the search results. I understand that the ADA is a bigger organization and may get much more traffic, and it would make sense for them to rank higher for general searches like “diabetes” or “diabetes in America” but you really do the ADS and all the people who search for it specifically a disservice by redirecting them to the ADA. Please don’t misdirect searchers who know what they are searching for, it lowers trust, and reeks of bias (one of the main things people come to Brave Search to avoid).
Brave Version (check About Brave):
Version 1.75.181 Chromium: 133.0.6943.141 (Official Build) (64-bit)
@Tahoua
I can inform the search team about this. However, you seem to imply that this is being done intentionally when that is far from the case. I am also not sure how this has anything to do with “bias”.
Additionally, when I perform this search, yes you’re correct – Brave Search does display the ADA first, but the ADS is the second link on the page. It isn’t as though the ADS is being buried below a ton of other results and hard to find, it’s just not the very first link.
Further, I tested this on other search engines and it looks like the results between them are fairly evenly split. For example, DDG, Yahoo and Bing seem to place ADS at the top:
Again, I will ping the Search team about this as I do think that it should be the first result that appears on the page. But it’s important to note that this is not done intentionally, does not have anything to do with “bias”, nor is it outlier behavior with respect to other popular search engines.
Sorry if by “bias” it sounded like Brave is biased against the ADS. I guess by “bias” I mean bias toward large traffic sites. From a small business perspective, it really hurts small businesses when a potential client searches for an exact phrase and no results with that exact phrase show up in the top results. And you are correct that it is a common problem among search engines. But in my experience Brave search is a step above others in many ways. So improving your algorithm to allow people to more easily find what they are actually looking for would seem like something your team would want to do.
You may not realize it, but Brave and other search engines do an extreme disservice to small companies and organizations when they can’t even get ranked when searchers search specifically for the their company’s name. You would be doing a great deed if you would just let people find what they actually search for.
My example of the ADS vs ADA is just one of thousands of such examples of the general problem. I’ll give you another example that I personally had to deal with. I formerly owned a painting company named “Appaloosa Painting Co.” For about a year after appaloosapaintingco.com was established, it was almost impossible to find the company in search results, despite registering with Google, Bing, etc. It makes sense that it would take time to get enough traffic to rank for search terms like “painting company” or even “Appaloosa paint” (since there’s a paint horse breed called appaloosa). But you would think that since there is only one or at least very few companies named “Appaloosa Painting Co.” that search engine algorithms would be smart enough to figure out that when someone searches for “Appaloosa Painting Co.” that they actually want a page that has the words “Appaloosa Painting Co.” on it, and would put that page at the top of the search results. But it took a very long time and lots of work to get the company ranked even for its own name!
I know the problem is general and widespread, frustrating lots of people, because now I consult for small business owners. Among the things I do is help them get ranked. I can’t begin to tell you how dissatisfied small companies are they they have to pay people to help them get ranked even for exact searches of their own name.
So in summary I’m not just asking you to fix the ADS vs ADA problem. I’m asking you to let people who search for a company with its exact name find that company at the top of the list.
I use Brave search as my primary search engine, but just wanted to suggest an improvement that would make a lot of otherwise frustrated people happy!
@Tahoua,
I definitely understand where you’re coming from and as I said previously, I agree that the behavior should be adjusted to push exact matches to the top in this way. I’ve reached out to the Search team about this to see what can be done.
