So I have trouble with PRESEARCH on both BRAVE and Chrome browsers. Basically, when I try to search I was getting logged out from PRE and the search was left on the "Loading" stage and never completes. This happened yesterday on Chrome and not sure how long before that on Brave(I didn't look into it). Nevertheless, I decided to contact the Presearch support last night to see what's happening and if this is an issue with my account or it's something Global.
The reply from the support was quite fast - some Presearch user created a Twitter bot that started spamming everything on Twitter that has hashtag "brave".
This resulted in Brave devs blocking the Presearch URL and if you are using the Presearch with Brave Shields UP you will not be able to complete the searches and will be logged out.
The situation with Chrome now seems to be resolved - I am using an adblock software called "uBlock" and it was also preventing me to use Presearh. The solution from the support was this:
switching to the new Presearch Engine anyway, as the results and experience are superior.
To do this:
- Go to https://www.presearch.org/account/search-providers
- Search for ‘Presearch Engine’ in the ‘Filter Providers’ field.
- Click on the P_ icon to add it to your list of engines.
- Drag it all the way to the left after it’s been added to your row of search engines.
- Click on D_ for Dsearch, then choose ‘Remove’ from the menu that appears.
- The next time you search, it should give you the new engine.
So far for the new engine, I can tell that it is faster and looks the same. I have no opinion yet on the quality of the results - probably I will be able to say more after some time. But between the old Presearch engine and Google search I would give a huge advantage to Google -> the results are always better.
When using Brave with the new engine and shields up, it still a mess. I get logged out and can't log, the login button/token display starts missing. The support informed me that they will continue looking into this on how to resolve the problem for everyone.
In any case, the user that created the Twitter bot was probably having good intentions, however, the result from it was a slight disaster, and as the Brave dev wrote this affects the Presearch's image in a negative way. Even if the bot is not really affiliated with the Company itself.
Also, all of that could be related to Brave developing their own search engine:
Which, to be honest, would be very pitty if that's how they decide to proceed. Of course, as of now, this is purely speculation. As of now, I will keep using both Presearch and Brave and following this topic to see how it plays out.
