I will say it's nice to have them actually honour keywords in searches that google has made harder and harder to discover and seems to ignore at will (inurl: site: etc)

The funniest one for me in google is +"foo" they decided people didn't actually mean it, so they changed it to +""foo"" - then when we all started doing that, they made the new secret "yes I really want that string" to be +"""foo"""

Try kagi :)

DDG used to have a graph showing the number of queries they did daily. It was around 100 million searches a day before they removed it a few years back. They were receiving bad press at the time IIRC.

An educated guess is they're doing a similar number of searches today.

I've been liking the Brave browser. The only thing I dislike is how many damn Cloudflare captcha's I have to go through all across the web. However in a way this may actually be a feature as I believe it shows that Brave's fingerprinting protections are actually effective. I didn't get these on other browsers as they were likely very easily fingerprinted.

I did have one site which told me I needed to use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox to use their site. Which kind of made me laugh considering the engine Brave uses. It was a really interactive JS heavy training site, so I guess they really wanted to be sure the browser was compatible to avoid support issues.

If you're on macOS, take a look at Orion from the team behind Kagi Search. It runs on WebKit, is really light on battery usage, doesn't come bundled with crypto stuff or AI agents, and still supports Chrome and Firefox extensions natively

If you're looking for a no-AI vibe from your browser, you probably won't get it from Brave. Zen might be a better fit.

If you're just trying new browsers to see what's out there and clean, I've really liked Orion.