Rant

Brave's not the only search engine to do this, but it's just one of a million reasons not to use Brave. They're a scummy company. From this Reddit post:

In 2016, Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own, basically trying to extract money directly from websites without the consent of their owners

In the same year, CEO Brendan Eich unilaterally added a fringe, pay-to-win Wikipedia clone into the default search engine list.

In 2018, Tom Scott and other creators noticed Brave was soliciting donations in their names without their knowledge or consent.

In 2020, Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.

Also in 2020, they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: "the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression."

In 2021, Brave's TOR window was found leaking DNS queries, and a patch was only widely deployed after articles called them out.

In 2022, Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.

In 2023, Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users' computers without their consent.

Also in 2023, Brave got caught scraping and reselling people's data with their custom web crawler, which was designed specifically not to announce itself to website owners.

In 2024, Brave gave up on providing advanced fingerprint protection, citing flawed statistics (people who would enable the protection would likely disable Brave telemetry).

In 2025, Brave staff publish an article endorsing PrivacyTests and say they "work with legitimate testing sites" like them. This article fails to disclose PrivacyTests is run by a Brave Senior Architect.

All of the search engines I’ve used do this and it is infuriating. If my search returns little or no results, then so be it. Don’t populate my results with bullshit you thought I meant; you’ll almost always get it wrong. I didn’t mind the “did you mean”; it was a suggestion, and a choice that I could decide if I wanted or not. Now they just cram results down my throat, whether I want them or not.

I miss the early 2000s Internet.

I really hate that search engines feel like they have to return a bunch of results no matter what, like the Google Play Store. Even if they don't have what you want, they'll give results for what they think is similar, and just ads. It's infuriating looking through results trying to find if the thing you're looking for is buried in a bunch of useless stuff.

That’s too short to qualify as a rant. Do whatever necessary to get some outrage built up, then come back to us with ~3 or so paragraphs.

If you need help, consider using the “angrier” parameter with 5 peppers on this page: https://goblin.tools/Formalizer

I started paying for kagi when I learned it works more like classic (vintage?) search engines. More focused on accurate results, which may be a few or nil, instead of mangling your terms into something they can sell & insert the highest paying advert that matches something close.

I have not been disappointed. They also do AI stuff, if youre into that. Or you can toggle it off, and never use their assistant.

"spouse husband"?

related to that:

do you know any search engine that actually accepts commands in image search?

like every single one i tried ignores the "-"

i want to exclude certain tags goddammit

was it always like this?