Results seem politically skewed

I certainly hope it’s Perry obvious that I’ll always stand for common sense and truth. Sadly it’s something greatly missing in the world today where everyone only wishes to see the world from their point of view and make things “us vs them” instead of working together to resolve issues.

And giving another example of what you’re referencing:

You commented that you use leftist terms in the search and then get upset when the results are left leaning. It’s like searching for something in Spanish and being mad when very few English results come up.

I mean, try doing the reverse. Use right leaning terms and let me know if you see nothing but leftist results. That’s when you really know there’s a problem. But using leftist terminology and being upset when left leaning sources are provided, seems to be a stretch

I searched Brave for:

  1. “Trump attacked by media”
  2. “Media attack Trump.”

I got the links on how Trump attacked the media! This was 180 degrees from what I was searching for.

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Can confirm, brave search now gives “Anti-results” for politically charged searches. It gives the opposite of what the search looked for.

Oh, we can try that. No, your theory is false. After giving it a shot, it gives the same biased results, rather than what the search was trying to find.
Look, just be honest and admit it. You are a company, you are under heavy pressure from the big corpos to censor your results. If you don’t censor, you will be deplatformed.
That’s the same as everyone else.
Just don’t pretend that you are not doing it, stop trying to gaslight the users. It’s obvious.

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No, your theory is false. I mean, I’m a person and not a company. Secondly, I don’t work for Brave or anything. I’m just a normal user who has spent a lot of time helping others.

I’ve been trying to look at this with others and figure it out. So in one situation we had like had been mentioned here, where people used specific terms. When I put that in on all search engines, they all came up with the same type of criteria.

Then there was one where someone mentioned “media attacks Trump” and other similar phrases, but rather than showing where the media had been going after Trump, it focused on lots of stories from like 2017 to current talking about how Trump was attacking the media.

Yet prior, we had one where someone claimed they tried to search RT (Russia Today) and it only showed with negative results. I did the same search and ended up with different results then they claimed.

Lastly, had one that said they researched id.me and it only spoke positive of it. Yet when I did the search it spoke about the outrage over it, highlighted how the IRS isn’t going to use it, that people are fighting lawmakers to make sure it’s not implemented in their states, etc.

All of that said, there are instances when results are questionable. I don’t comprehend why they pull some of the things they do. But I also have had others where people just straight up “lie” (not sure better word choice, but give completely inaccurate information. Seems intentional).

We’ll replace “you” with Brave. I’m not sure why you think Brave is under heavy pressure to censor anything. They’ve already said they aren’t and it’s times like this that companies thrive by being different. Refusing to censor is one of the positives.

What evidence do you think you have on saying they’d be deplatformed? I mean, if you’re just referring to how they have to abide by some laws or risk losing licenses or getting fines, you’d be correct. But censorship isn’t one of those things that they have to do much of and it’s been officially announced they won’t censor or modify their search database.

Brave doesn’t censor, and Brave doesn’t inject bias into Search results. We go far beyond paying lip-service to this commitment too; we’re developing Goggles to prevent this issue.

What’s Happening?

The query Peter Santilli returns one set of results, while the query Pete Santilli (note the spelling of the first name) returns another. Mr. Santilli’s podcast uses the “Pete” variant, along with numerous other sites. As such, “Peter” may be expected to yield less-relevant results (without the engine trying to be clever, and conflate Pete and Peter).

Both forms returned Mr. Santilli’s podcast URL at, or near, the top of the results.

How can we Improve?

There are a couple of ways the query results could potentially be improved on our end; Peter could be treated as a common variant of Pete, and a couple more sites could be scanned more frequently for content (i.e. rumble.com, and locals.com). But it’s important to note that Brave’s results aren’t being skewed by another other than name-confusion, and breadth of indexing across the Web.

Update: I just took a closer look at locals.com, wondering why we weren’t listing the many videos on that domain. It turns out none of the content is immediately visible when you visit the page (I had to click a “see the content” button). And, once you jump to the content, it is dynamically loaded via scripting, rather than provided in the initial server response. These 2 patterns alone guarantee that most crawlers will not be able to discover the content.

On Neutrality and Search Results

There’s something we need to consider when discussing neutrality, and what to expect in honest search results. Search engines discover the Web via basic means. We’ll find domains and sites when they are linked-to or referenced from elsewhere. This networking effect will almost always benefit larger sites, with larger user bases.

As a Search Engine scours the Web, it crawls over the content of various pages and attempts to learn about the subjects covered on each. To assist search engines in this learning process, authors of sites can use carefully-crafted HTML tags and more to property identify and mark key portions of their pages and publications. This is an engineering task, and requires a trained individual to do properly.

Given these realities, Search Engines are almost always going to display results from larger, well-funded, and more established outlets. This is very likely going to be the case for popular topics and events, since the “competition” for those topics will be more fierce. If ideologically-inclined sites happen to employ authors, engineers, and content-distribution managers to write, code, and cast their content out onto the Web, they will tend to appear higher in results pages.

How you can Help!

If you would like to help us make sure more properties are indexed (such as Rumble, Locals, etc.), please consider opting-in to the Web Discovery Project. It’s our best hope in competing with Google and Bing (the source of DuckDuckGo’s search results).

Anytime you see results that raise an eyebrow, or give you cause for concern, please do let us know. While we are not (and will not be) injecting bias into our results, there may be ways that we can improve our discovery/indexing/crawling process to result in a better, more replete view of the Web.

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This thread was brought to my attention, and I think it’s worth answering. My name is Josep M. Pujol, I’m responsible for Brave Search. Prior to joining Brave, I spent 6 years building the eventual foundation of Brave Search at Cliqz.

Brave Search does not censor. The fact that some expected results aren’t returned is not the result of censorship; it’s the result of search-engine-development being hard, and forever a work in progress.

There is some confusion between censorship and bias. Brave does not practice censorship; there is no intentional suppression of results due to politics or ideology[1]. Regarding bias, we do have “biases”, but not the type being discussed in this thread. There is no bias towards liberal or conservative media—we don’t even have information regarding the ideological leanings of sites across the Internet.

The strongest “bias” is towards popularity, but there are many other influencers to consider as well[2]. Popularity of course does not equate to truth—everybody knows that—however statistically speaking it works in most of the cases. Where does it fail? On controversial topics where the opinion of the majority might not be correct. Search engines tend to favor the most popular content, provided that the terms of the user’s query match the content with confidence. In the majority of cases, different views and opinions will be represented in the results. But in some cases, one view may take the whole page. It’s as simple as that, Occam’s razor.

Couldn’t Brave Search detect certain cases, and make sure the results are balanced? That’s easier said than done. As of today, we do not have the technical capability of doing that. But hear me out, we do not want to have it either. That would actually be dangerous, and it would open the door for real censorship. The moment we start using whitelists and blacklists we stop being a service and become the ministry of truth.

How does Brave intend to compensate for biases introduced by popularity? By enabling users and communities to correct existing biases with their own with the upcoming Goggles project[3]. In our opinion, this is the best approach to not becoming a single source of truth, as well as ensuring that users and communities remain in control of their experience and exposure in the future.

I hope this response helps to shed some light on the discussion.

[1] Suppression of results is limited to the following cases: CSAM content (child pornography), DMCA notices on copyright infringements, and of course, compliance with relevant laws for the countries in which they apply.

[2] Some domains you find to be missing (or underrepresented) could be more difficult to crawl than others. Some pages you judge to be more relevant could be more difficult for our crawler to parse. The list goes on and on; there are hundreds of reasons why certain domains/pages rank lower (or higher) than what you think they deserve. And none of them are ideological—at least not in Brave Search.

[3] https://brave.com/goggles

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Thank you for the recommendation to Startpage. I just tried this search on both pages and the results on Startpage are definitely superior.

“how Biden raised gas prices”

The Brave results are nothing but MSM articles absolving his administration of any blame. The Startpage results have more diverse viewpoints.

I’d hate to stop using Brave search, because I think it’s a great browser but the search is getting worse and I don’t know why.

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You do know that Starpage uses google search index. They have legal deal with google for it and both are business partners. Just look it up.

So when you searching on startpage you are proxing results to google search engine.

Then it seems like google has a more diverse results page, doesn’t it?

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You are free to use it then.

It was a joke. I would say you lost your argument in the beginning itself when you mentioned startpage.

Either enable WDP protocol or use Result Hunter (which uses google/bing index itself). Yandex Search less censored than Brave Search? Please say it isn't so! - #27 by chh_68

There are only 4-5 search engines with their own index - google, bing, mojeek, brave search (it’s own index not fully fledge-in beta), gigablast etc. Indexing the full web and presenting it to users by relevance is not an easy thing to do. As you said, more technical experts than you (and me) are working for a private search engine with their own index. So, let them work on it.

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For “Alex Jones” the results are no different to Google, DDG, etc. Some of them do show infowars.com several results down or on the next page. The only one which shows infowars at the top is Yandex (Russia).

Someone ran a series of tests on Yandex a while back and it came out as the least biased of the search engines! Even searching on Ukraine war or Ukraine invasion gives standard results that the others do, except that RT appears as the first hit. But you don’t get a bunch of pro-Russia results that you might expect if it was just “pro-Putin propaganda.”

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They want us all to dye our hair blue and wave the lghsjxhri flags on TikTok.
There is barely anything neutral left on the internet. Unless you know where to look.

Clown world coming for us all.

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Trying Presearch, Gigablast or Nibiru? Forget not 4search (Conservative Search)

Brave is certainly NOT neutral. I’ve been looking into vaccine injuries in young adults becase I know of TWO who’ve died within 24 hours of getting the pfizer vaccine. One was 26 and the other 19, neither had co-morbidities. So when I type in phrases like “sudden death in athletes after covid vaccine” everything that shows up in the search results relates to DEBUNKING the assertation that the covid shots cause vaccine injuries. Now that’s just BS. I work in health care and I damn well know how to query the VEARS database. Also know young patients who’ve developed chest pain after getting the vaccine. I shouldn’t have to look at Telegram or Substack to get the information I want.

Shame on you Brave!

Would appreciate thoughts from readers on a better search engine.
Thanks!

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I just did the same thing my question was asking “ will trump run for president again” the results brave put up was all anti trump why is this ?

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I have said it multiple times, read the above explanations or use Result Hunter search engine.

I just tried it and received the same results as you. Left feedback. If I have a phrase in quotes, I expect to find that exact phrase in the results.

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Focus on the Family is automatically labeled as a “fundamentalist” organization.

At what point in this obvious Culture War are we going to accept that certain places (BRAVE SEARCH) need our OWN biases to level the playing field? The internet is not operating on US Law with basic human freedoms. At what point do we get up early Christmas day and actually acknowledge reality? Sir Pujol, you are smarter than I am. If you wanted a search engine fair for Conservatives, it would be there.

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Presearch has the same problem. Personally I think Liberals infiltrate all these places and these places are too lazy to kick them out.

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