I'm really annoyed by how much Brave Search is pushing AI

Interstellar_1@pawb.social to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 162 points –

I've been using Brave Search supplemented by Startpage for the past 2+ years. When I search for something, I want to get results for credible webpages, not a summary of unknown quality. I liked the previous AI inclusion because it was instant, didn't take up much space, and I could quickly navigate to the websites referenced in it, but with the new feature it takes up more space, is slower, and not really what I want out of a search engine.

As soon as the feature was rolled out I disabled it in settings, but the AI button stays visible, I get autocomplete specifically for Answer with AI and I get frequent notifications to try out the new AI feature. An opt-out toggle should not mean that I still am pestered to use the feature I opted out of.

This is really annoying, and I'm probably going to end up switching to Startpage or SearXNG or something.

Some images (opted out of AI features):

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Yet another reason why people shouldn't be using Brave.

If you want a privacy-focused web browser, use Firefox or Vivaldi.

I thought Vivaldi was also shady? Did I maybe confuse it with Opera?

Probably.

Opera is shady. Vivaldi is developed by the people who used to develop Opera, back when it was its own thing and before it sold out to Chinese investors.

Vivaldi is closed-source. Can it be trusted?

I dunno. Everything I've seen and heard seems perfectly legit.

But it's yet another chromium fork, and I don't use it.

I did for a while, as it has some very nice features, but it would consistently open without resuming my session. It would work for months and then just out of nowhere it would open up as if it was just installed. Everything gone. Utterly unacceptable.

I don't think you're replying to my comment though, I never mentioned nor used Vivaldi.

Edit: brainfart, my bad.

Don't stress over it. I didn't read the entire thing either. It's a relatively long article.

I Read the first few paragraphs and then when the ADHD kicked in I skim scrolled all the way to the bottom where "Vivaldi" caught my eye

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated and have a great day.

On topic, I have no opinion on Vivaldi, never used it. But then again I've been on Firefox for the last 15 years so... I'm a bit of a lost cause!

I used it because the results were better for me then the other search engines I have used, but yeah I don't agree with anything the company or it's CEO is doing, so there's no better time to stop it then.

Yeah that's the issue with them, their products are not that bad at first glance and they have a lot of evangelists online (it was particularly egregious on reddit but it is still the case here). I wasn't throwing any shade at you.

Search engines pretty much all suck nowadays. I've stuck with DDG lately, but they also have their issues apparently.