One of the search engines that I use regularly is Brave Search. I have several reasons for that: it is fast, uses its own search index that is fully independent from Google Search and Bing Search, and often good at uncovering results that are burried deep under pages of “what the search algorithms believe is better content”.
For Maps, I do rely on Google Maps. While there are other maps services out there, I found most of them lacking in one way or another. However, in some countries, like Korea or China, I do use different map apps as Google Maps does not work well there or at all, or because they are better.
I stumbled upon Brave Maps just recently. It is not brand new, but Brave does not appear to advertise or link to it much at this point. From what I can tell, it appears to be based on OpenStreeMap for the most part.
You can run searches for places and get information, descriptions and reviews taken from TripAdvisor. One downside is that directions is not baked in but redirects to Google, Bing or OpenStreetMap route planners. That is somewhat of a let-down and will hopefully get addressed in future updates.
Another issue is that reviews are not fully baked in. You get some for a location, but they may be cut off and after three or so, a link to Tripadvisor points to the rest of the reviews. This is a main issue, as you can’t use Brave Maps to search all of the reviews for certain information.
All in all, it is good to see that Brave is adding a Maps feature to its growing list of services. However, at its current stage, it lacks essential features and that reduces its usefulness quite a lot. It is probably one of the reasons why Brave is not heavily advertising the feature yet.
Still, if you are looking for non-mainstream maps services, this is one to keep an eye on to see how it evolves in the coming years.
> “From what I can tell, it appears to be based on OpenStreeMap for the most part.”
It explicitly says so, under Map data attribution:
Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and is available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
I switched to brave search recently too, from DDG because “I WANT” the AI summaries at the top of the search results.
What I do not want is to follow vague links that say “look, your answer is in here” (along with tons of ads).
There’s supposedly a huge consumer backlash against AI search results. I believe that it’s actually a large advertiser backlash.
I like Braves AI too, a blending of local LLM’s I could download and run myself if I had the VRAM for it. It’s a novel approach that lets them stay in control of it instead of just repackaging someone elses service.
Anytime you want to write about search engines, I’d be interested. Google has gotten a lot less useful, and not just from AI. They took away cached results. They took away the ability to see 100 results per page. There’s no ability to exclude video from results. For obscure things, I used to make extensive use of the advanced search operators, and then would skim 100s or even 1000s of results until I found what I was looking for. Attempting that with today’s search engines seems like a waste of time.