Should I be worried about this development?
So far, I’ve tried Stract and 4get, and I’m not impressed with how limited they are - they’re not accurate, and no image and video search is what turns me away from them.
Metasearch engines like SearXNG aren’t that impressive, their results have too many filler results. My experience with manually tweaking their search also did not go well. Any alternatives with good defaults?
Short answer: inserting affiliate links into results, and weird cryptocurrency stuff. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
I don’t know if that’s “worse than Microsoft” because that’s a real high bar. But it’s different anyway.
OK, like I said above, I’m not using their browser. How would any of this affect me using a website?
I’m not entirely clear on which (anti-)features are only in the browser vs in the web site as well. It sounds like they are steering people toward their commercial partners like Binance across the board.
Personally I find the cryptocurrency stuff off-putting in general. Not trying to push my opinion on you though. If you don’t object to any of that stuff, then as far as I know Brave is fine for you.
I have never run into anything crypto related using their website…