For the past few hours, I have been consistently encountering CAPTCHAs on Brave. With every search. I’m not talking about the usual Proof-of-Work ones, but truly annoying CAPTCHAs with images to select (see attached proof).
I even tried reconnecting to my Brave account, through which I pay my annual subscription to support their engine, and I still have to deal with them.
I continued testing various things, and I eventually figured out that this type of CAPTCHA only appears when I’m connected with a French IP address. Indeed, I alternate between Proton VPN with a French server (since I’m French) and Mullvad VPN with a Dutch IP address (I use the servers with DAITA).
I really like Brave for their open-source work on privacy-respecting tools, but I’m honestly starting to feel the limits too much (crypto stuff, Search & Ask Brave not being open-source…). The Brave experience contains too much small problems that I try to remove but can never fully be satisfied. My trust and comfort are declining, I might end up switching to Mullvad Browser + DuckDuckGo.
Any ideas on why this search engine would make such a stupid specific decision?
Kagi seems to be doing a good job, and I am closely following what they do, but I don’t want to (and can’t currently) pay $10/month for my searches. I’d rather pay for what I consume like on Nano GPT than pay such an expensive subscription for what it is.
Same as comments above. At the end of the day it’s pretty self-defeating for them do so, as many of their users would be using a vpn. I still use it on Desktop, as it use new PoW capctha with are slow but don’t require any intervention.
Expensive is relative when you account for usage. It depends on how much you use and the value you extract out of the service or the product for all that it can do.
Like anything, Kagi may not be for everybody or at least just yet. But I’ve been enjoying using it as it does the job very well. Unless deep researh is all you use a search engine for, Kagi is equivalent if not better than other non Google options.
There’s always the html version I linked above unless you don’t wanna miss for queries like “Weather in Los Angeles” or something and you want DuckDuckGo to show you the weather but if not then yeah
What do you mean by “pushing AI too much”? I started using it a few weeks ago and haven’t seen too much AI crap. They have Quick Answer but that’s about all I have seen. Am I missing something?
Quick Answer is AI and if you chat it leads you to duck.ai conversation based on the query and answer
DuckDuckGo has a no ai and even an html version tha get rids of it with the html one getting rid of the JavaScript bits. But instead of Antis respecting the fact that it is an option, they insist on not using the services and that’s in my opinion pretty harmful
I’m a student (so no income apart from family) and my number of searches is over 300/month but not huge, and it increases during my periods of research for my studies. So I’m the worst possible type of person for Kagi because my research is irregular and semi-high.
For transparency, I must say that I no longer have the problem from yesterday and that it has been resolved (if it was a problem).
I’m very sad that Mullvad Leta (which was proxying Brave) is closing, because I used it a lot. If they could have also proxy the AI answers, that would have been amazing.
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