> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google

As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.

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estimator7292 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.

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veqq 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Kagi is just an AI company. (That was always their stated goal...)

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mghackerlady 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article or relevant docs)

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input_sh 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi

...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.

For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.

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freehorse 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> on a forum run by its investors

They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.

> 250x the number of users

If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.

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input_sh 5 days ago | parent [-]

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/

Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?

	▲	freehorse 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it Probably a bunch are users here, but 1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are talking about YC itself rather than random users 2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards a sustainable, long term development rather than quick profit (so far) 3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between them and YC itself in general 4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here, quite a few other users do the same without being investors (I have done/do it), and the former would probably do it without being investors anyway. There are bigger problems than some random people who invested in some company write once in a while supporting comments in some forum online. I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted as either the users of the forum are investors or the admins/owners are, so I tried to address both. I think it is more like that users here are more prone to like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more time online on a computer, they have jobs where web search is important to them etc), so you have people saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not necessarily extend to the general population as much because most people do not care as much about these things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow. People can also just be satisfied with a product/service and talk about it.

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5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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MarsIronPI 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Meh, my trust in Kagi is kinda shot, given that they seem to have forgotten that sales tax existed[0].

[0]: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

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vjvjvjvjghv 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why is Brave getting hate? Their browsers are treating me very well on mobile and desktop. I am always horrified when I see how the web looks for other people with all ads.

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freehorse 5 days ago | parent [-]

For many reasons, one being that they were injecting urls with their affiliate codes to unsuspecting users.

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armedpacifist 5 days ago | parent [-]

This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.

If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.

I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.

	▲	freehorse 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate, "mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't trust brave and think I have better options for a browser. If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for you.

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CuriousRose 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does.

This is really cool.

I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.