I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?
If you’d not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why? I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I’m not into self hosting.
No.
Brave is one of the more privacy-centric search engines. I don’t think it is the best on privacy, but it is pretty good.
I moved away from Brave Search when they went 2+ months only offering Google or Bing for their image searches. I can strongly recommend digging into https://search.disroot.org though!
trustworthy
They are recommended on privacy guides: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#brave-search I generally trust privacy guides, although I don’t use Brave Search.
CEO
Their CEO is anti-vax and homophobic. Brave Browser (not search) has had some controversy around including crypto, replacing ads with their own, and having had inserted affiliate links into the URL bar in the past.
censor stuff
Hard to say, the job of a search engine is to show you what you want to find.
data collection
There is telemetry that can be turned off.
You can view “Brave ads” in exchange for crypto. That is what I meant by replacing ads.
No. Use Qwant instead.
Just gave it a try… Doesn’t appear to work for browser default search settings? I do a search and see results for about 2 seconds before it then shows their search page. I used https://www.qwant.com?q=%s for the query. Liked the search results I tested it with but not being able to use the search bar for quick searches is a deal breaker for me :(
