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 rediit 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.
evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
That’s too short to be a rant. Do whatever you necessary to get some outrage built up, then come back us ~3 or so paragraphs please.
If you need help, consider using the “angrier” parameter with 5 peppers on this page: goblin.tools/Formalizer
normal_user@hexbear.net 8 months ago
That’s actually kind of fun:
“Why on Earth do you think I go out of my way to use those blasted search operators if you’re just going to completely IGNORE them?! Brave Search is utterly PATHETIC—so incompetent that they just dismiss the operators because they CLAIM there aren’t enough results. THAT’S THE ENTIRE POINT of using search operators in the first place! I DON’T want a ton of junky, irrelevant results; I want just a FEW GOOD ONES! This is basic, essential, COMMON SENSE! Now! Get your act together and SEARCH “spouse husband” PROPERLY for me—do the job right so I finally get the RESULTS I NEED!
Imagine, if you will, telling you to make me a simple sandwich with TWO ingredients, and instead, you go and THROW IN a thousand more just because you think it’s “not enough.” THAT’S NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!
And tell me—WHAT’S the POINT of having this “search operator” feature if you’re just going to completely FLUB it and IGNORE it at will?! What’s the USE of a tool that the system simply DISRESPECTS and dismisses on a whim?! I am the ONE sitting behind the wheel, I’m the ONE with the goals, and I DEMAND you do what I ask! Stop wasting my time with idiocy!”