For all the love DDG gets on this site, it’s not really an independent search engine. It relies heavily on the Bing index, despite spinning it as using it as one of many signals. Brave has its own index and that puts it in another class. In my experience the results have been higher quality, too.
Have you spent much time with Brave Search? I use Firefox and currently have DDD as the default search on my laptop, but I often use the !g operator since the DDD results are routinely not as good as Google. I’ve had a significantly better experience with Brave Search, though. I’ll probably switch my default soon, once I learn the operators that Brave supports.
The bang operators for ddg justify it as my default even knowing that it isn’t very good for some queries. The habit of being able to reroute a search to the engine that will handle it most appropriately is a killer feature. Only drawback is that the redirect can take an extra few seconds sometimes.
It’s hard to imagine replacing it. If Brave search becomes excellent then I can just use the bang for it.
What wrong if they’re trying to find more money while providing privacy?
Would you rather have a browser from rich monopoly like google? Or an alternative thats self sustainable with its own money?
Of course it does. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and companies have to make money. One of the best things about Brave is that it's aggressively trying to build independent revenue streams and a footprint on the net. A company with solid, diverse, independent sources of revenue is much better positioned to keep making independent decisions.
