Searching for information about covid vaccines and the allergic reactions that RFK was talking about in Brave Search and, by default, the results are:
factcheck[dot]org
fda[dot]gov
time[dot]com
wikipedia[dot]org
thehill[dot]com
20apnews[dot]com
forbes[dot]com
cdc[dot]gov
vanityfair[dot]com
nytimes[dot]com
I check Google for the same search and I get almost identical - all left leaning websites. And I can appreciate having a diverse opinion set provided in the search results but that’s literally all I’m getting. I have to go through many pages to find just one page that supports a different perspective. The funny thing is that I know there are a lot of people out there with very negative opinions about the recent vaccines but none of that comes up. Instead, the Legacy Authority voices come up first.
I remember when DuckDuckGo was in its first 5 years. You could use it to find conservative and liberal sources of information. But as the coders got their greasy hands in the mix, the conservative sources started fading away. And when you went to their community board to express the opinion, they would shut down your thread and insult you for daring to bring it up. Now they give hundreds of millions of dollars each year to progressive causes. I’ve noticed in a few threads here on Brave that a similar thing is happening where they insult you for bringing something like this up.
If my searches are going to be left wing by default, I might as well just use Google, right? Combine this with the human verification tactics for literally every search when you’re on a VPN, and it’s just not worth using Brave anymore.
Maybe I’ll come back and check the progress in a couple years and see how Brave is doing. It’s a shame that a search engine who has its own index ended up mirroring other search engines in terms of content. What a waste of money that was.
You’ll see there are some shared sources (especially if it’s from big governmental resources like the CDC), but they pull quite a bit different. Not only in the phrasing of your search term, but in using Goggles.
Search query: RFK “adjuvant sensitivity model” vaccines johnson and johnson
Yeah, you’re right. It’s my fault that Brave search results, by default, come up as near mirror images of Google search results. I should have filtered the results after the fact to curate them for my bias rather than Brave search, by default, should not mirror Google results since, after all, it’s an alternative search engine for a reason. I should have known better. It’s just my bias that’s the problem. I should have have known that, by default, everything will have a left leaning slant and that’s not at all a systemic or hardwired bias. NAH, COULDN’T BE! It’s me that’s biased. It’s me that’s complaining because of my own beliefs when that’s not evident in my search query in the first place. I couldn’t actually be a politically neutral person who’s capable of noticing patterns and so I tend to want to avoid certain political biases. You sound totally unbiased. Everyone who uses Brave who expects alternative results should have to go read how Brave’s index works first. All 8 billion people. And if they don’t… it’s their fault. Lol. Thanks, but no thanks.
The default should be unbiased, but it just keeps getting worse as time goes on!
I actually think the Brave team does not understand what a left-wing position is vs a balanced opinion (I’m assuming they are acting in good faith, which I have no reason to assume otherwise).
Ask any question about DEI or LGBTQ stuff and the answers go WAY far left. Normal people do not think like this. Only perpetually online far left-wingers and perverts do.
But almost any question that even steps on the boundaries of these topics bring up responses like "It is essential to educate your self on this far left message of the day or that up means down really you bigot or something along those lines. I am pretty tired of hearing how unbiased you are when this crap is in my face every day from you.
Just admit you are left or stop it! Pretty easy really. Be true to your self.
Update:
So using the political filter (left wing or right wing) it does, in some instances, help find information I’m looking for. And I really like that feature. Filters are great! But ultimately it doesn’t solve the problem of left leaning bias being the current default search, why such bias is baked into the cake (ad populum maybe?), and how Brave can cleverly avoid this unfortunate issue going forward without deliberately trying to hide left or right sources. Side note: I’m quite suspicious about how the search engine is filtering those results based on politics and its definition of right and left and, therefore, what results it’s leaving out. Sounds like something that could be ruined in the future by the political bias of coders.
I realize this is not the place for a feature request but I think I have a way to solve the problem. The solution would be to have a checkbox that instructs the search engine to filter all the results by having it completely eliminate any popular or traditional information source, no matter the political slant of the source. Thus, at the users request, Brave would be relying entirely on sources that are less traditional, obscure, harder to find, regional, etc. You could even call it a “deep search” or something like that. This would return the information the user is seeking out, regardless of the users or the sources political bias. For example, a while back it was more common for left wingers to be openly anti-vaccine. But today it’s more common for right wingers to be openly anti-vaccine. If I’m searching for anti vaccine perspectives, eliminating all the older left wing sources would be detrimental to my own search needs. Does that make sense? Filtering the results based on political slant is a recipe for inferior search results. But eliminating sources based on current popularity of the source, would be really helpful. Because this is the problem. The most popular sources of information today are often filled to the brim with propaganda, lies, deceit, misdirection, etc. But more obscure sources may be less infiltrated by the powers that control most major publishers. Voila! Problem solved.
(it’s not perfect but it’s a lot better than sorting based on current political bias)
Edit: perhaps there’s a way, for now, you could achieve this same effect in a search result such as: “antivaccine -npr.org -slate.com -cnn.com -fox.com -time.com -mayoclinic.org -cdc.gov”
but alas, it doesn’t work and I’m not sure how I could write out all the filters. Feel free to teach me.
