Brave Software has introduced a very useful new feature to its search engine, called Discussions, that will help surface the results users are really looking for.
“When people search, they want relevant, useful results, free of noise,” the company wrote in a blog post. However, advances in the field of SEO have propelled less useful resources up the rankings.
A recent viral post took a look at the issues in more detail, provocatively arguing that Google Search was “dying”, because useful answers are becoming harder and harder to find.
The solution, as many people have found, is to add “Reddit” to the end of results, surfacing discussions on the topic that have taken place in a relevant sub-reddit.
The Discussions feature for Brave Search introduces a panel directly into results highlighting any relevant discussions from popular online forums, including Reddit.
Brave says Discussions are especially useful for several specific types of searches: product questions, questions about current events, travel-related questions, computer programming / coding questions, and highly unique or specific questions.
Search wars
Google is, in many ways, the best internet service ever to exist: cataloguing the entire web and helping people search for pretty much anything was such a massive breakthrough.
But whether the dominance of Google has been healthy for the search market is another question. In its blog post, Brave argues that the focus on Google rankings among businesses has had a particularly detrimental impact.
“Unfortunately, search engine optimization has become such a science – and a big business – that results pages in Big Tech search engines like Google are often cluttered with ads and automated content (or “SEO spam”) from marketers trying to game the system and increase the rank of their sites,” wrote the firm.
While Brave occupies a tiny share of the search market, it's interesting to see pressure applied to Google and perhaps there's a team at the search giant working on a Discussions-esque feature, too.
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