[HN Gopher] Brave Search beta
___________________________________________________________________
Brave Search beta
Author : vmullin
Score : 815 points
Date : 2021-06-22 16:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (search.brave.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (search.brave.com)
| Dah00n wrote:
| I tired some programmers searches and some that has caused
| controversy in other search engines (like "easiest way to
| suicide") and I'm sorry to say I get 100% the same results as I
| do from Bing. At most there are widgets (like DDG) and maybe
| swapped a place or two in the top 5 results as a difference. I
| can't see any indication of their own indexing at all.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I find it very interesting that Eich was outsted from Mozilla for
| his anti-gay stance, and much of HN was in agreement at the time,
| yet this seems to never come up with Brave despite LGBTQ rights
| having far stronger support today. Why is that?
| pmurt7 wrote:
| I support LGBTQ rights, but I hate cancel culture. It's not
| acceptable to bully someone for something wrong he said or did
| many years ago.
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| Yes lets all grab pitchforks and chase him out of town because
| of his religious beliefs.
|
| So sick of leftists and your constant attacks in the name of
| diversity.
|
| Go find a hobby, you're not trying to further any cause or help
| anyone, you're just looking to cause drama and attack people.
|
| It was the majority opinion to oppose same-sex marriage. Are we
| going to cancel everyone who once or still supports it?
| Remember we are still very much a Christian country. Obama in
| 2008 ran against same-sex marriage and cited his Christian
| beliefs as the reason.
|
| We'd have to cancel many people's careers to pass your purity
| test of a clean history of accepted beliefs.
|
| In the woke world, similar to North Korea, if you commit a
| thought crime, you will be considered dirty blood, and it will
| be attributed to your family and friends as well.
| azinman2 wrote:
| First, I'm not looking to cause drama or attack anyone. I'm
| genuinely curious and to know what changed? It was a big deal
| then, but seems to never surface with anything Brave related
| since. And as they make bigger and bigger splashes, and this
| continues to not come up, I'm wondering why that is?
|
| You're making a lot of assumptions about me, my motives, and
| belief structures. I'm just seeing a change in behavior on
| this issue in combination with larger societal sea changes,
| and wondering about the inconsistency.
|
| Meanwhile it sounds like you're wanting to grab a pitchfork
| and chase me out of town for asking a question rooted in
| curiosity, which I understand to be the basis for HN
| conversation.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| You're concern trolling. It's blatantly obvious: Hey, I
| just have a question. Five paragraphs later...
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| You know exactly what you're doing. It wasn't a big deal
| then, and it shouldn't be a big deal now. It's cancel
| culture and you're participating in it.
|
| This is an amazing release and I'm glad Brave revived the
| technical marvel that was Cliqz, you can see that on
| display in their blog: https://www.0x65.dev/
|
| But no, you decided to bring up bullshit drama. You're not
| generally curious, and even if you were, it's not really on
| topic. It's negative and non-constructive.
|
| You fool no one when you hide behind your "I was just
| asking a question" defense. You knew ahead of time what
| your question would provoke.
| kbelder wrote:
| The 'anti-gay' stance was that he donated to a campaign for
| prop 8 in California; that preposition passed. So he was guilty
| of agreeing with the majority of voters in California.
|
| It's not that odious of a sin (and I disagree with Eich,
| incidentally). Should the majority of California citizens be
| canceled, permanently? Not allowed any leadership positions?
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'm not trying to re-litigate the past. But it was enough of
| a consequential donation back then to have removed from as
| CEO of Mozilla. So that's a pretty big deal. Somehow that has
| never made its way into anything related to Brave as far as
| I've noticed, and generally I've followed the company at
| least in terms of top HN links (always curious to see what
| people are doing in the browser space). I've never seen it
| mentioned in any articles discussing Brave, or in any of the
| HN commentary since. I just find that odd, especially against
| the bigger societal winds. I'm wondering if I'm missing
| something like he himself did some about-face, or people lost
| track of this, or if they just don't care anymore or what?
| But not only did Mozilla care back then, but quite a bit of
| HN did as well when it happened.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| > But it was enough of a consequential donation back then
| to have removed from as CEO of Mozilla.
|
| False. The reason for leaving Mozilla was never published.
|
| > I'm wondering if I'm missing something like he himself
| did some about-face, or people lost track of this, or if
| they just don't care anymore or what?
|
| So your disappointed Hacker News isn't more engaged with
| identity politics and cancel culture?
|
| And by the way you are wrong. It has come up in several
| threads in the past.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25844354
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549604&p=2
| azinman2 wrote:
| > False. The reason for leaving Mozilla was never
| published.
|
| Well, then the timing is so aligned then at this point
| it's just occam's razor unless there's another
| explanation.
|
| > So your disappointed Hacker News isn't more engaged
| with identity politics and cancel culture?
|
| There's plenty of that. It's nearly daily now on HN. That
| wasn't my point at all. Just the inconsistency has always
| been apparent for years now so I finally asked the hive
| mind.
|
| > And by the way you are wrong. It has come up in several
| threads in the past.
|
| I stand corrected. I had never noticed those comments.
| That said, it was easy to not notice them as they're a
| tiny fraction of everything around Brave and have almost
| no discussion around them compared to his original
| ousting.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| It's not a current news event. It's old news. Why are you
| so desperate to cancel him... again?
| azinman2 wrote:
| This is the last time I'll mention this here as it's
| getting not only repetitive but it feels like I'm the
| only one discussing in good faith:
|
| 1. I'm not trying to cancel anyone
|
| 2. I'm not trying to start a flame war
|
| 3. I haven't actually stated any "sides" in this
| discussion at all
|
| 4. I've wondered about this for years now and hadn't
| personally seen it brought up at all, thus prompting my
| question.
|
| Sheesh.
| dang wrote:
| If you say you didn't mean to start a flamewar, I believe
| you, but it's such a classic flamewar topic and has been
| so done to death for so many years, that other users
| can't be blamed for thinking otherwise. The effect was to
| troll the thread even if was unintentional.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| sor...
| zeven7 wrote:
| Every time Brave comes up on HN I search the comment
| section for "Eich" to see if this is still being mentioned.
| It always is. That's how I found your comment. You just
| haven't really been looking.
| xeromal wrote:
| It was a wave of public emotion that gout Eich ousted.
| crackercrews wrote:
| Is there a way to make this the default browser on iOS? I can see
| how to make it the default for searching in Brave but not system-
| wide. This matters for Siri-initiated searches.
| fx18011 wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gdp+of+brazil&t=h_&ia=web
|
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=gdp+of+brazil
|
| One thing I am frustrated with DDG is its lack of summary card
| for some entries. I think Brave search better in this case.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I wish them luck. More competition in search is welcome. I don't
| think I will use it very often though because accuracy in search
| results trumps any concern I have with privacy online that I get
| from using google or bing.
| staticmist wrote:
| The result accuracy actually seems pretty good thus far.
| Although I have mixed feelings about Brave as a company, I may
| have to switch over from DDG/SP.
| RileyJames wrote:
| But which is more accurate google or bing? Having used DDG
| (~bing) for a few years now, at first I felt it was inferior,
| but I stuck with it for the privacy. Now I feel it's roughly
| equal, depending on the query. Google is full of spammy SEO
| content, where as DDG elevates niche content (probably more
| because it's not targeted by SEO spam, but I'll give them the
| benefit of the doubt)
|
| I feel it's somewhat impossible to discern accuracy in search
| results, as you can't see what's missing. But by the time you
| feel the results are missing something, they're likely missing
| ALOT.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I actually wrote a userscript to allow me to easily switch
| from bing to google or other search engines
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/403095-altsearchrefactored
| spiderice wrote:
| > Now I feel it's roughly equal, depending on the query
|
| As someone who is trying to switch to DDG for the 10th time,
| I really wish I felt this way. My experience is so different.
| Right now I'm at the "g! Everything" stage. Which comes right
| before the "give up and just switch back to google" stage.
| DDG results are seriously so bad. It baffles me.
|
| I really want to remove google completely from my life.
| Search and YouTube are the only two things holding me back.
| And neither have any competition that is even remotely close
| imo.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Have you tried Searx[0]? It's the privacy nuclear-option,
| and supposedly gets better results than DDG or Google (if
| not, don't shoot me: i'm just the messenger)
|
| [0] https://searx.space
| blackcat201 wrote:
| Any idea why this reply is downvoted? It seems there's a
| lot of comments that has a slight negative or doubt are
| downvoted in this thread. You just don't see this
| behaviour on any other HN thread.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| part of the accuracy comes from google knowing who you are and
| what you typically search for.
| akyshnik wrote:
| If accuracy means creating a personal echo chamber, then I'm
| against this kind of accuracy
| merlinscholz wrote:
| Loving Brave search so far, but I am wondering if there is a way
| to manually add sites to the index? Adding them to the Google
| index and hoping for Brave to pick them up doesn't seem like a
| clean solution.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Brave can't get the site from Google index (well they _can_ but
| that would get them sued out of existence). You add to Bing to
| get a site on DDG and Brave search.
| meinfuhrer wrote:
| My first impressions using this are really good. I've been using
| DDG on mobile for many months (while sticking with Google on the
| desktop), but increasingly grew frustrated with the overall
| speed, and results on some queries...so I reluctantly switched
| back to Google on mobile this week.
|
| Unfortunately, looks like there's no way to set this as the
| default on Samsung Internet at the moment so I'm going to stick
| with Google for now.
| zanethomas wrote:
| compare search results for "lab leak"
|
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=lab+leak
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=lab+leak
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lab+leak
|
| https://www.bing.com/search?q=lab+leak
| kbelder wrote:
| How do they fare on the 'tank man' test?
| zanethomas wrote:
| nearly identical, iirc that was not the case on june 4th
| bart__ wrote:
| What am I supposed to see? All engines give the same or very
| similar results for me
| zanethomas wrote:
| At least for me I saw that the search results for google were
| similar to brave while those for duckduckgo were similar to
| those from bing.
| [deleted]
| zanethomas wrote:
| The detractor below apparently fails to understand that
| searching for controversial topics is a great way to see
| which search engines are similar, or relying on the results
| from other engines.
| bmarquez wrote:
| This is a great idea. I also tested this out with "Alex
| Jones", some engines show articles criticizing him above
| his own website.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Probably some conspiracy nonsense.
| zanethomas wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think it's relevant to make such a
| remark without a shred of evidence regarding my thoughts.
|
| I left it for the readers to form their own opinion.
| Something you apparently are loath to do.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Yes, I say what I mean. I don't hide behind the "I'm just
| asking questions" facade.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| S/he literally didn't ask any questions though. Sounds
| like you have a lot of baggage and you're throwing it
| around here.
| schmorptron wrote:
| This is one to look out for, I've been using this for about a
| week, and the search results have been really good, empirically
| they feel a bit better than DuckDuckGo. If this stays this good
| over time and ends up having the same acceptable amount of text
| ads as DDG in order to be sustainable I might switch to it for
| good.
| open-paren wrote:
| I think they copied DuckDuckGo's bangs.
|
| It's nowhere in the documentation, and the UI never indicates it,
| but bang searches (like `!stackoverflow parse html with regex`)
| work in Brave Search exactly as they do in DuckDuckGo.
|
| Preliminary testing of mine suggests that they just copied
| DuckDuckGo's list directly-I tried a few obscure ones from DDG,
| like `!ldss` or `!uib`, and they work in Brave Search.
|
| @w0ts0n any details you are willing to share?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| We support many shebangs, with more to come in the future. For
| now, this is what is offered:
|
| !i - Search Images
|
| !n - Search News
|
| !a - Amazon
|
| !b - Bing
|
| !d - DuckDuckGo
|
| !e - eBay
|
| !g - Google
|
| !p - Pinterest
|
| !r - Reddit
|
| !s - StartPage
|
| !w - Wikipedia
|
| !li - LinkedIn
|
| !gh - GitHub
|
| !gm - Google Maps
|
| !so - Stack Overflow
|
| !tw - Twitter
|
| !yt - YouTube
|
| !wa - Wolfram Alpha
|
| !mj - Mojeek
|
| !osm - Open Street Map
|
| !mdn - Mozilla Developer Network
| CallMeMarc wrote:
| Are the !a and !e bangs for Amazon and eBay defaulting to
| .com and if yes, is there a way to get them to default to
| e.g. amazon.de?
| open-paren wrote:
| If that's all that's offered, why does DDG's obscure shebangs
| work on Brave Search?
|
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=!hn+brave+search
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Oh, apologies for the confusion. We support DDG's shebangs
| too; the above list is what we add to the list.
| xpe wrote:
| !g is called a bang.
|
| A shebang is something else ('#!').
| minitech wrote:
| Out of that list, the only two bangs that DuckDuckGo
| doesn't support are:
|
| - !d (it's already DuckDuckGo, so !d is "dictionary")
|
| - !mj (it's !mojeek)
| open-paren wrote:
| No worries. Congrats on the launch.
| xpe wrote:
| !g is called a bang. A shebang is '#!'.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| Looks cool! I sort of hate the UI though. Everything is so spaced
| out, on my screen i literally don't see the results. I see two
| top results, and 3 videos _(it's not a video search..)_, and
| that's it. Those top results i'm not sure if they're paid or not
| - so it makes me feel unsure if i'm seeing any real results or
| not.
|
| The page seems to waste space. I'd need a compact mode to use
| this search. The UI is difficult for me.
| butz wrote:
| Strange, that there is a separate search tab for videos, but no
| "text only" search. Considering that 99% of video search
| results will be on youtube, I'd probably go straight to youtube
| if I needed to find a video.
| crowf wrote:
| 2 minor comments:
|
| 1 on mobile it is very convenient to have an x in the search box
| in order to clear that text from the previous search
|
| 2 when correcting spelling it would be nice if it bolded the word
| that was misspelled rather then the entire search phrase
| strin wrote:
| My two cents on paid search engines: yes so much awareness around
| privacy these days. so there might be a potential shift in user
| behavior, which opens up a big market. however, i am skeptical
| because people are used to free search engine that surfaces good
| results.
|
| so privacy is great value prop. but not so much that i am willing
| to pay for it while living with worse search quality.
| bosswipe wrote:
| My dream for a search engine is to be able to exclude the entire
| ad+seo web from my results by filtering out any results that have
| 3rd part ad javascript. Then we could actually find the non-
| commercial web again and hopefully help it grow.
|
| This search engine is just trying to copy google's with a few
| tweaks in the result, not that interesting.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| I really like that they are pulling SO answers into their
| results: https://search.brave.com/search?q=strpos+php
| Dah00n wrote:
| Yes, if they asked for permission (and pay if asked). Otherwise
| it is the same as what Google was sued over. I wonder if they
| did ask first.
| ajayyy wrote:
| SO is CC BY-SA https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I'm stoked on this. Brave search may truly bring some new blood
| to the browser/search wars. This is what we desperately need as
| google gets less and less useful.
| yewenjie wrote:
| There is a self-hosted Google search (which just strips some
| tracking but ultimately sends the query to Google nonetheless).
|
| - https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
|
| I would be curious if what HN thinks of it. I have experimented
| with it and it works fine from a user perspective.
| gr3pls wrote:
| Looks good
| growt wrote:
| In really hope this improves. I firmly believe the web needs an
| independent index besides Google and MS. But the first two
| searches I made sadly returned subpar results. So I'll keep my
| fingers crossed.
| FireflyChild wrote:
| I've been using it for a while with the beta, it's nice, but I
| wish they had a map page. Seems like something they could add in
| pretty easy, I guess.
| didip wrote:
| oh, wow! Not bad at all considering they are building their own
| index. I like their results better than DDG.
|
| Between Brave and Vivaldi, I think moving out of the Google world
| for common folks is a possibility now.
| austinshea wrote:
| brave is bad
| gr3pls wrote:
| google is worse
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Lex Fridman interviewed Brendan Eich earlier this year (a real
| gem of an interview, in my opinion).
|
| I found all of it interesting, but here's a timecode link where
| they begin to discuss the current era of "browser wars",
| technical aspects and history of privacy protections, ads,
| search, and how that's all related.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE&t=7652s
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Contrary to Brave Search's instructions to click the three dots
| (...) in Firefox's URL bar to add Brave Search, I don't get the
| dots at all.
|
| I do get Brave Search as a button when I click the URL bar and it
| drops down, but if I click on the Brave Search icon to add it,
| Firefox says:
|
| Invalid format Firefox could not install the search engine from:
| https://search.brave.com/auth/assets/opensearch.xml
| w0ts0n wrote:
| Edit: Try now, fix is out.
|
| We are aware of the issue. We have a fix pending.
| howolduis wrote:
| > On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts
| affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into
| the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research
| revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency
| exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the
| users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said
| "we're correcting".
|
| Brave is just a "pop-privacy" company. I will skip this one...
| propogandist wrote:
| Honey, a browser extension that harvests user data and injects
| its own affiliate links was acquired by Paypal for $4 Billion.
|
| Publishers are shilling amazon's prime day because they're all
| amazon affiliates wanting to earn their commission. Similarly,
| all those "price comparison" and coupon sites are injecting
| affiliate codes and just redirecting you to the merchant.
|
| I don't see how Brave did something egregious injecting
| affiliate codes to earn commission from certain vendors, if one
| of their users signed up for a service. Keep in mind the
| dominant, alternative browser (Chrome), built by an advertising
| company, is privacy hostile and trying to use new tracking
| technology (FLOC) as they phase out cookies. Firefox is kept
| alive largely by $ paid by Google and seems to be getting worse
| with each release also. I'd rather see a competitive browser
| that doesn't have to take $$ from Google to stay alive.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Patching a few things in chrome is radically easier than
| maintaining and improving a completely different browser
| engine. And just because Google pays some money to firefox
| for their own selfish reason to not be caught in monopoly
| busting doesn't create any twisted incentives for Firefox. It
| is _the_ privacy-oriented browser fighting for a worthy case.
| Also, it is improving all the time - it's just that for some
| reason the few missteps are way overpronounced.
| grumblenum wrote:
| Almost all of Mozilla's revenue is from Google. I don't see
| how bad incentives could possibly be avoided, assuming
| Mitchell Baker wishes to keep herself in the lifestyle to
| which she has become accustomed. I do believe they engage
| in copious moral bargaining to maintain their image as
| plucky underdogs sticking it to the man.
| ntp85 wrote:
| > Also, it is improving all the time - it's just that for
| some reason the few missteps are way overpronounced.
|
| I don't understand why Firefox gets this benefit of doubt
| and other browsers (e.g. Brave) do not.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Well for one, because Mozilla has contributed
| significantly to the world and have a long history of
| doing so. (Thunderbird, mdn)
| ntp85 wrote:
| Thanks, that's a good point. BAT and the associated
| concept of rewarding content creators or Brave Search
| could be seen as contributions to the world as well, I
| think.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Brave's co-founder (and CEO) is also the co-founder of
| Mozilla. Our other co-founder (now CTO) was also an
| engineer at Mozilla for many years, and behind many of
| those contributions (several other Brave staff is
| directly connected to Mozilla as well). They started
| Brave in the same spirit, to improve that which is
| broken, and create a better, more equitable Web for all.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| That's not accurate. Brave offered affiliate link options to
| users who were searching for particular terms (screenshot:
| https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png). These
| were presented to users as a way of optionally supporting Brave
| development. Our mistake was matching fully-qualified URLs too
| (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/image2-1.png). When we were made aware
| of this, we corrected the issue promptly. No revenue was made
| from this feature either. No user data was involved. No privacy
| or security was compromised. This was nothing more than traffic
| attribution as a means of optionally supporting an open-source,
| free-to-use browser. Read more about this feature at
| https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
|
| Compare this with traffic attribution in other browsers: open
| Firefox and begin typing a search query. If you monitor your
| network activity, you'll find that your keystrokes are not only
| sent to Google behind the scenes, but those requests also
| contain an identifier so that Firefox gets paid for sending you
| and your queries to Google. Brave users were shown the
| affiliate options before any network activity. Read more at
| https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/.
|
| As for the question of privacy, Brave was compared to Chrome,
| Firefox, and more in a review by Trinity College in Dublin, and
| they found that Brave exists uniquely in its own category as
| the "most private" browser tested. Read their technical paper
| here:
| https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.
| 55555 wrote:
| > No revenue was made from this feature either.
|
| You definitely would have made some sales instantly with your
| userbase. The only way this can be true is if you refused any
| payouts because you saw it would be bad PR. I judge based on
| intentions. The choices Brave makes over and over show you
| guys are a shady affiliate type company with a mask of
| developer and privacy friendliness.
|
| > Compare this with traffic attribution
|
| This is really not the same thing. It's barely relevant. What
| Brave did is much closer to cookie stuffing. ie: zero value
| provided to the businesses. I have to now ask you to please
| not reply with a myopic technical or legal definition of
| cookie stuffing as you will otherwise do so. You are missing
| everyone's points on purpose. It's a strange coincidence and
| is only easy to understand when one realizes you are paid to
| do so.
|
| Lastly, the first screenshot you linked is egregious. Thanks
| for providing an honest one. That is absolutely insane. You
| have an aggressive legal team, for sure. Anyone else would
| put "AD" float:right on that menu item. (If this was there
| and you cropped it out then actually I take back this
| criticism.)
|
| You have a tough job mate. You have a shady employer and your
| job is to trick everyone into thinking they aren't shady even
| as they relentlessly do shady things.
|
| I actually don't care about any of this stuff, I just don't
| like this community being lied to or manipulated. Hackernews
| is smart but can be manipulated just like reddit as you are
| seeing. You're only having luck because everyone here hates
| Google and tracking so much and so desperately wants to
| believe. But even if you guys do shady stuff I'm all for more
| competition in the browser and search space.
|
| Anyway, what are the CPMs on your pops and the min daily
| buy/commitment and is anyone else actually making money with
| them? Is it pops or more like PPV (url based targeting?) I
| buy Opera and recently looked into your program.
| lethoso wrote:
| "No revenue was made from this feature either." Isn't that
| just stating that you were caught before you had the chance
| to make money from it?
| kowlo wrote:
| What about Safari?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Safari was covered in the aforementioned browser-privacy
| study as well: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/brow
| ser_privacy.pdf. It finished with Chrome and Firefox in 2nd
| place (behind Brave).
| howolduis wrote:
| you work for Brave. I can't take what you say on face value
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Please don't take my words for granted. Verify everything.
| If you wish to prod a little, I'm always happy to chat :-)
| string wrote:
| Appreciate you taking part in the conversation. So often
| people complain about companies not communicating like
| humans, but when they do people almost seem to get more
| pissed off. You can't win really.
| permo-w wrote:
| Will this search engine have better filters, and an
| option to sort results?
|
| It's always bothered me about Google that there's no sort
| feature, especially by date
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Can you tell me more about the "better filters" request?
| Regarding _sorting_ , that's great feedback. I'm curious
| how you would see this implemented. Would the _sort by
| date_ arrange results in order of their _modified_ date,
| _created_ date (such as when they were published), or
| perhaps their _first indexed_ date? There are a few other
| dates that could be considered too.
| 6510 wrote:
| a slider that adds weight to time stamps
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Disclosure: the author of this comment appears to be a Senior
| Developer Relations Specialist at Brave.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Correct. Note the use of "we" in my comments, pointing out
| that I am part of the Brave team. Thank you for stating it
| more explicitly.
| [deleted]
| pmurt7 wrote:
| "Mozilla's Mr. Robot promo backfires after it installs a
| Firefox extension without permission":
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/mozillas-mr-robot-promo-ba...
|
| All companies make mistakes. That's part of the journey. This
| affiliate referral code thing is becoming boring at this point.
| It was 2 years ago. Move on. Better look at what Brave is doing
| good right now, but I suspect you have an agenda, so you can't.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Their attitude towards
| advertisement and cryptocurrency is the reddest flag
| imaginable.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Elaborate, please? The blockchain enables everybody to
| participate, earn, and support content creators in an low-
| friction, anonymous manner. Advertisements serve as a great
| way to introduce revenue into the system (by way of
| advertisers who wish to reach an audience). Brave pulls it
| all together into a single, OPTIONAL component, which guards
| the user's privacy and security by conducting its operation
| locally, on the user's device with client-side machine-
| learning. No red flags here.
| Aaronn wrote:
| > in an low-friction, anonymous manner
|
| Ah yes completely anonymous, unless you want to withdraw
| https://support.brave.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
| gr3pls wrote:
| It's crypto, cashing out requires identification
| according to government laws unless you're a money
| launderer.
| someperson wrote:
| Brave blocks webpage's existing ads then replace the ads
| with their own ad network that earns the website owner
| Brave-money that the website owner then has to redeem.
|
| That tactic is definitely a red flag.
| huntermeyer wrote:
| No they didn't. This is misinformation. They didn't
| replace ads in a webpage. They displayed ads via desktop
| notifications or push-notifications. The end user opts in
| for this.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| They are just moving the ads from one place to another.
| Its the same thing.
| Bantros wrote:
| It isn't
| gr3pls wrote:
| This is such a blatant lie. No wonder why fake news is
| widespread
| jonathansampson wrote:
| That's not how it works. Brave blocks third-party ads and
| trackers (which are known to be dangerous) on behalf of
| its users (the same users who were installing uBlock
| Origin in Chrome and Firefox before coming to Brave).
| This is a security and privacy _necessity_ on the Web
| today.
|
| Users are then able to opt-in, if they like, to a novel
| advertising platform within the Brave ecosystem. These
| users can earn rewards for their attention (70% of the
| associated ad-revenue). Ads are displayed within Brave
| and on the user's desktop; ads _are not_ displayed in any
| publisher-owned space (e.g. a website or YouTube
| channel).
|
| With these rewards, users are able to contribute to
| [verified] sites, channels, etc. The publisher/content-
| creator must already be verified to receive any rewards
| from users. If a user attempts to contribute to a non-
| verified site, the tokens remain on the user's device for
| up to 90 days.
|
| This isn't much different from how PayPal allows you to
| send money to an arbitrary email address, regardless if
| it is associated with a verified PayPal account or not.
| This model simply addresses the problem of blocking
| harmful ads and trackers, while offering no alternative
| means of supporting those same content creators.
| smoldesu wrote:
| We don't care what it does with the previous ad data,
| what's disturbing is that _there is even a setting to
| opt-in to more ads in the first place_. Many people
| (myself included) will be completely turned away because
| of that option. That 's just the cost of doing business.
| mapgrep wrote:
| Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that's bad
|
| Someone from Brave: actually we don't replace existing
| ads at all, here's why
|
| Person 2: no one cares what you do or don't do with
| existing ads!
|
| I don't have any connection to Brave but I find it odd
| they've become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their
| iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles
| ahead of the other options. But merely by _trying_ to be
| privacy first they get crap for not always being perfect.
| See also: Signal, OpenPGP, Firefox.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| >Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that's bad
| >Someone from Brave: actually we don't replace existing
| ads at all, here's why
|
| Me: Brave guy used a lot of words but what they said was
| they remove ads from one place and move them to another
| place, that's still replacing ads.
| cortexio wrote:
| not if it's opt-in... if i install a firefox plugin that
| puts all pages full of ads, it's not firefox doing that..
| it's me.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I didn't realize Brave had become a "hate figure" here
| but it seems like the discussion in this thread took a
| hard turn to the kind of conspiratorial, reactionary,
| nasty "gotcha" reply behavior I come to Hackernews
| specifically to avoid. In this thread are multiple
| examples of the Brave employee saying Thing A and just
| getting mean-spirited responses reframing A as negatively
| as possible as if it's an argument retort.
|
| Example: "Oh this person works for Brave, don't trust
| them." Or in reply to the post explaining what sounds
| like a bug in the application being misread as a way to
| grift money from traffic, "No revenue made? So you got
| caught before you got paid?" Or the clarification that
| Brave browser ads are confined to the browser and OS UI
| followed by repetition of the same insisted point that
| they "block then replace browser ads," while the rep
| seems to have explained quite clearly opt-in browser ads
| are not presented inline to the webpage content. It is,
| sorry to use a tired comparison, "Reddit behavior."
|
| I recently saw a note by dang in a Bitcoin thread about
| how crypto tends to generate repetitive arguments on HN
| and it seems like that blind spot for the community may
| have eclipsed Brave by association (maybe in addition to
| HN's negativity towards anything ad related). I keep
| scrolling further expecting to learn something salient
| about why I shouldn't trust Brave but instead I see a
| bunch of people beating on a community rep.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Haters gonna hate.
|
| This problem is all too common though in all parts of
| life. Someone does something with a good intention for
| the betterment of people/society and then some others who
| are not on the other side of the status quo have have to
| come bring negativity because all they have in them is
| destructive and constructive (hate vs compromise/support)
| drusepth wrote:
| I wrote up a too-long message trying to rationalize some
| of the repeated animosity directed at Brave Inc in almost
| every single Brave-related post (for as long as I can
| remember seeing them on HN), but I'm beginning to think
| even discussing it at a meta-level would prompt some of
| the same old repetitive arguments on HN and not be
| worthwhile.
|
| Instead, I'd like to just respond to this small bit of
| your comment, if you don't mind:
|
| >I keep scrolling further expecting to learn something
| salient about why I shouldn't trust Brave but instead I
| see a bunch of people beating on a community rep.
|
| A lot of anti-Brave comments are flat out wrong,
| factually incorrect, or just pure conspiracy/hate. A lot
| of other anti-Brave comments used to be true but aren't
| anymore. A few anti-Brave comments still are researched
| and reasoned.
|
| But it feels to me like any and all comments critiquing
| Brave instantly get either heated responses from Brave
| fans and/or dismissed entirely by Brave employees,
| regardless of their validity, which doesn't breed good
| discussion and typically devolves into argument and/or
| personal attacks (even from the Brave reps, which
| probably doesn't help their brand image).
|
| Brave has made a lot of mistakes over the years (both in
| bugs and business decisions they've since reverted). From
| the company/rep's point of view, they've made mistakes,
| learned, and improved. From the haters' point of view,
| the company's laundry list of shady scandals has
| decimated any trust left of what their reps say,
| especially when defending what looks like The Next Big
| Scandal. When those same reps dismiss what is or used to
| be a legitimate concern (for example, injecting affiliate
| links into URLs) as just "Brave doesn't do that", it only
| reinforces whichever perceptions people already have
| about Brave (those for-Brave see haters with invalid
| critique, and those attacking Brave see a rep gaslighting
| or dismissing what they believe to be true).
|
| I don't know what the solution to repair Brave's brand is
| for haters, but it's probably somewhere between
| acknowledging the mistakes of their past (instead of
| framing every response in the ultra-present-tense "Brave
| doesn't do that") and/or providing better educational
| materials for people to actually learn how Brave works
| instead of just vaguely knowing "they hide ads, but also
| show ads, but also something about cryptocurrency, but
| only if you watch their ads?"
| baggachipz wrote:
| The problem is that trust takes so long to build and so
| little to destroy. I still won't install or use Brave
| because I have a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind
| that I'll wake up to a forced update tomorrow that goes
| against my interest. They have an insane tightrope to
| walk in a world where they need to support their work yet
| not corrupt their product in the name of profit. Thus
| far, they've made several decisions which have knocked
| them off that tightrope. Each time, the long road to
| regaining trust is lengthened and reset. If they go a
| couple years with a clean track record, I'll consider
| trying it again, but at this point the brand is entirely
| tainted for me. Importantly, it doesn't matter if my
| feeling is currently true, it's been informed by history.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| This bullshit has nothing to do with Brave. Brendan Eich
| (Brave CEO) was cancelled years ago, and the mob is still
| after him. That's what going on really, it's cancel
| culture at its finest.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Won't anyone think of the poor homophobe?
| pmurt7 wrote:
| Thank you for making my point
| approxim8ion wrote:
| You're welcome. Someone should justify the imaginary
| boogeyman people cry about, it's no fun otherwise.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options.
|
| If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5
| most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still
| uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and
| Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://t
| witter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...),
| and later again for an official blog post (see
| https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-
| traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the
| other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out
| on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any,
| requests to Google.
|
| On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched
| a new window to find an immediate call to
| vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of
| information, including what appears to be a distinct
| 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key:
| pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to
| take a closer look into the traffic to determine how
| sticky these are to the user, device, or browser
| instance.
|
| Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the
| HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network
| activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the
| top of the list of browsers though. For example, they
| don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes
| as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly
| observed in browsers today.
| smoldesu wrote:
| At this point, I think I'm more comfortable with Google
| getting my data than Brave. Thanks for the help!
| gr3pls wrote:
| Ah yes, brand good
| jonathansampson wrote:
| We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models:
|
| 1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their
| attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a
| sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping
| malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site
| execution.
|
| and
|
| 2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards
| users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to
| view (the user controls frequency caps), and gives
| everybody (not just the wealthy or well-off) a way to
| support content creators.
|
| And you feel the second one is the "disturbing" model?
| dgan wrote:
| I actually don't mind seeing ads for stuff I like, and
| the idea to redirect revenu to support content creators
| is appealing. Right now I see 0 ads, maybe will get fancy
| and try Brave for fun
| smoldesu wrote:
| As much as I know you want to chime in here, I'm not
| going to play any games where you draw the goalposts. My
| current options are the following:
|
| 1. I can continue to use Vivaldi and uBlock origin as a
| completely open-source and so far flawless combo
|
| or
|
| 2. Go out of my way to switch to a browser with dubious
| privacy claims, a _goddamn personal cryptocurrency_ and
| (the cherry on top) a developer who spent the better half
| of his afternoon tracking me down and asking me why I don
| 't like their browser.
|
| I think I'm good.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Happy to hear that you're staying safe online. Nobody is
| _tracking you down_ though. You and I happen to be on the
| same page, engaging in conversation. Check my comment
| history and you 'll see that you make up only a small
| fraction of the individuals to whom I have responded. All
| the best to you though; sincerely wish you well.
| distrill wrote:
| You have more patience than I would have had in this
| thread. I guess it's your job to be patient though, or at
| least to deal with occasionally nasty elements of the
| community.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Is Vivaldi open source? The only reason I don't use it is
| because it's closed, so this would be great news!
| mkl wrote:
| No. They publish their changes to Chromium's code, and
| kind of dodge answering that question:
| https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-
| sou...
| kaba0 wrote:
| Why Vivaldi over Firefox?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Hi Jonathan, here is my hot take on the issue.
|
| When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting
| to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but
| because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them
| into buying things.
|
| When Brave blocks ads in one place, but shows others ads
| instead, the users are not actually protected from the
| ads, any potential money that may have been generated by
| the ads is effectively stolen by Brave.
|
| It's smells to us like you are just stealing peoples
| content.
| distrill wrote:
| > When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting
| to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but
| because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them
| into buying things
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting this statistic. Most
| people that I know, myself included, aren't trying to
| protect themselves from buying things, rather from
| annoying ads that clutter everything up and slow
| everything down. Perhaps brave isn't the best choice for
| you, but it certainly will be a good choice for a lot of
| people who are currently using adblockers.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I didn't quote any statistics. Perhaps I should have
| said, "some users" or I could have said "users are also
| protected from manipulation".
|
| I think if you thought about it for a while you would
| object to a constant bombardment of messages that you are
| not cool enough, or popular enough, or attractive enough,
| or fit enough.
|
| Or that when you searched for things you were shown the
| "best results" rather than whoever paid google the most
| for your attention.
|
| Or if you were thinking of buying a thing one day, but
| decided not to because you decided you didn't need it,
| you might prefer not to be constantly convinced to change
| your mind and buy the thing. Buy the THING!
|
| My iPad is too old for an ad blocker so I have to suffer
| constant abuse when surfing the web on it. Don't get me
| started on Apple.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| I'm part of the group GP refers to. I have no interest in
| ads. I might even be aggressively against them in most
| contexts. At best, they are a nagging distraction, and
| worst they are manipulation. I understand the value they
| bring to creators but where possible I opt for
| subscriptions or donations rather than ads, and have very
| few qualms about it.
| xgulfie wrote:
| I'm part of this group too. Fuck the current state of
| online advertising in its entirety. It's manipulative and
| is driving the web into the ground.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Considering their ads are opt-in this argument makes no
| sense. Which class of person both wants to "protect
| themselves from ads" _and_ opts in?
|
| Brave isn't a browser I use but you guys are not even
| reading the comments you're responding to.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| People who are tricked into thinking they are helping
| content creators by watching the ads that Brave serves.
| People who feel like they might be stealing a contents
| creators work unless the watch the ads.
|
| Why would anybody opt in to watch the ads otherwise?
|
| Update: Sorry, I just ready below that _users_ are paid
| up to 70% to watch ads which I did not realize even
| though that is what is said above. Explains why you would
| opt in.
| getcrunk wrote:
| And what's wrong with that? Brave blocks adds then allows
| you to opt in to see their ads. If that some how is theft
| then so is blocking ads in there first place.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| You're absolutely right that some people are not
| interested in ads, at all. And this is why they install
| content-blockers and more. This doesn't change the fact
| that many others install things like uBlock Origin for
| their security and privacy benefits. This is precisely
| why Brave ships with Brave Ads and Rewards _disabled_ by
| default. We believe that the _out of box experience_
| should be _blocking_. This works for both parties: those
| who want the reduced noise, and those who want the added
| security /privacy. I hope this helps :)
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I notice you didn't address one important part of my
| comment, that Brave is attempting to monetize other
| peoples intellectual property by stripping it of ads.
|
| There is a big moral difference between a community of
| people blocking ads for their own protection, and a
| company blocking ads for profit.
|
| --
|
| When somebody reads a web page, but blocked the ads, I
| like to think the reader is saying, I'm interested in
| what you have to say, but I'm not spending money today.
|
| When somebody uses the Brave browser and has opted in to
| other ads, I can only think the reader is saying, I'm
| interested in what you are saying, but fuck you, I'm not
| buying what you are selling, I'm going to check out these
| other ads, make some money for myself and for Brave, and
| If I see anything I like I'll buy there instead.
| 55555 wrote:
| Where can I buy these (banners?) and what's the min daily
| budget? I'm skeptical this will work long term as you're
| overlapping two of the worst sources of traffic:
| technically-inclined users and incentived attention.
| Would love to test it out for fun.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I would be interested to know what the conversion rate is
| like. Given users are literately paid to watch the ads,
| I'm sure it would be terrible. Worse even than a game
| were users have to watch an ad to get some in game
| currency.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| CTR is at about 9% right now (industry is about 2%). The
| difference here is that the user gets to decide whether
| or not they participate, and to what degree (up to 10 ad
| notifications per hour presently). Ads are selected via a
| machine-learning component on the user's device, so with
| greater diversity of advertisers and inventory, relevancy
| increases. And, users are rewarded NOT for their clicks,
| but rather for their attention. If an ad notification
| appears, and is ignored, you're still rewarded 70% of the
| associated revenue.
| xgulfie wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head calling it the basic
| attention token. While you haven't literally replaced ads
| in the page you are still removing their ads then adding
| your own. You didn't replace the ad directly, but you've
| redirected the user's attention.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Brave blocks harmful third-party ads and trackers. This
| is a security and privacy matter, as these types of ads
| are actually small scripts/apps which run in the context
| of your local machine.
|
| As malignant as third-party ads have become, they do
| generate revenue for content creators. As such, Brave
| didn't stop at "block, and let the creators figure it
| out." We did the work to propose a new approach to
| supporting content creators; one which doesn't cost the
| user their data/privacy in the process.
|
| In Brave, user's have to opt-in to Ad Notifications. When
| they do, they set the limits (up to 10/hr) on how many ad
| notifications can be displayed. Matching happens locally,
| so the user's data never leaves their device. And 70% of
| each ad's revenue is allocated to the user's anonymous
| wallet, which can flow out to the sites they visit (and
| proportional to the amount of time they spend on those
| sites) each month.
|
| This is indeed a replacement model; we cannot continue
| down the path we've been taking for 25 years. One which
| treats users like products, harvesting their data at
| every turn, and auctioning them off to a sea of third
| parties. There's a better way, and we're just seeing the
| start of it with the Brave model.
| powerlogic31 wrote:
| I get dizzy from their design colors and contrast.
| gpmcadam wrote:
| I'm really impressed by how finished this beta feels. Well done!
|
| The only thing stopping me from trying this out as my default
| search engine is my new-found reliance on the 'bang operators' on
| DuckDuckGo. Being able to type: !subreddit or !maps or whatever
| right in my address bar has become so convenient I feel I'm
| probably locked in for now. Maybe if something similar appears in
| future versions I might switch.
| pythux wrote:
| Hey, have you tried bangs on Brave Search? Lots of them should
| already work out of the box, if not, please let us know!
| gpmcadam wrote:
| Oh wow, I had tried `!reddit` and didn't get redirected so
| assumed none of them worked. Just tried `!subreddit` though
| and that one works. Will definitely give this a try as
| default engine now. Cheers.
| budibase wrote:
| I've been using this for a day, and it's been surprisingly good.
| My only concern, is the grip of the Google ecosystem always seems
| to lure me back in.
|
| I feel, for this Brave to truly win, they need to consider Auth,
| workplace tooling, and email. Attempt to match Google toe-to-toe
| and fight them as a platform/ecosystem, rather than a search
| engine.
|
| Easier said that done, of course.
| dvcrn wrote:
| Is there any way to make this the default in Safari?
| aembleton wrote:
| I'm impressed. I've been using DDG for many years. Generally I
| don't need to revert back to Google; the last time I needed to
| was last year when looking for a particular GPX file for a walk I
| wanted to do called the Hebden 22.
|
| The search query was 'hebden 22 gpx'. There are many pages out
| there with broken links, and I probably went through the top 20
| or so on DDG with no success. When I tried Google, the 4th result
| returned a page with the GPX once you've registered for a free
| account.
|
| That page appears at number one on Brave search!
| [deleted]
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Is this actually more private then just opening your
| chrome/Firefox/etc in incognito mode and using Google?
| vlunkr wrote:
| I really don't understand Brave. What special thing do they offer
| that people actually want? The main concrete selling point seems
| to built-in ad blockers, but we've had that for ages in every
| other browser. They have some crypto stuff going on, I'll be
| honest, I don't understand it, because I don't care, I just want
| to browse the web. That should be possible without a blockchain.
| They claim performance is better, but at the end of the day, it's
| chromium, I'm skeptical that they can do much to make a huge
| difference. Now they're offering yet another search tool. ok. If
| they didn't market themselves so aggressively in tech circles I
| think we would have all forgotten about this.
| growt wrote:
| I use brave on mobile. Because they seem to be the only stable
| Browser that offers bottom UI (tabs and new tab button in a
| bottom menu bar). I don't know how people use >6" phone screens
| with navigation all on top and I have hands the size of dessert
| plates!
| [deleted]
| hellcow wrote:
| Firefox offers bottom UI on Android and supports ublock
| origin.
| growt wrote:
| When I tried it, it was crashing a lot.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| People want a browser with an ad-blocker, and are too lazy to
| configure it themselves. Brave adds it and starts some "tell
| your friends" marketing hype. The rest writes itself.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > People want a browser with an ad-blocker, and are too lazy
| to configure it themselves.
|
| It's always shocked me, but this really is the case.
|
| I make a habit to install an adblocker (if they consent)
| whenever using a friend's computer, and have had many thank
| me for doing so a week later, saying what a huge difference
| it is - but none had thought it was worth the "effort"
| before.
|
| ?????
| smoldesu wrote:
| The world of postmodern software really is confusing.
| bmarquez wrote:
| It's not just laziness. My elderly parents aren't technically
| inclined, and are quite stubborn to learn.
|
| After they were phished by a malicious banner ad, I told them
| to install Brave since the idea of browser extensions would
| go over their heads.
| bmarquez wrote:
| > What special thing do they offer that people actually want?
|
| Brave has iOS bookmarks sync with Windows, while preserving
| privacy (by not asking for an email to create an account).
|
| Firefox and Edge require an account, Vivaldi doesn't have an
| iOS app, Safari requires a separate iCloud install on Windows,
| and Chrome is a non-starter for privacy reasons.
| counternotions wrote:
| "Three times faster than Chrome. Better privacy by default than
| Firefox. Uses 35% less battery on mobile."
| smoldesu wrote:
| If we're trusting the lies they dump onto the website, that
| should make Safari the fastest browser! /s
| nwienert wrote:
| It is?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Where is the lie? Independent researchers have found Brave
| to exists in its own class as the "most private" browser: h
| ttps://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.
| Happy to discuss any concerns you may have.
| smoldesu wrote:
| That paper compares them to Chrome, Firefox, Yandex, Edge
| and Safari. _Of course_ your browser phones home less
| than them, it would be pretty damn hard to make a browser
| that _does_ beat them for violating user privacy and
| security.
|
| Brave isn't competing against those browsers though. If
| you want to impress people who care about security,
| compare your browser to options like Vivaldi and
| Ungoogled Chromium. Otherwise, you're just bragging about
| having less telemetry than the foxes in the hen-house.
| entropie wrote:
| > What special thing do they offer that people actually want?
|
| I tried every browser and was a long term chrome user. I tried
| brave and was immediately sold. I use(d) chrome/chromium (and
| recently used vivaldi) on 3 different plattforms. Brave is
| noticeable faster on every one. I use it for like 3 month now
| and _never_ looked back.
|
| Its a very pleasant experience for me.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Brave is noticeable faster on every one
|
| This is interesting, because in my experience Ungoogled
| Chromium/Vivaldi feels much snappier than Brave across my
| computers. Especially on older devices (like my trusty X201),
| Brave starts to really chug when I open more than 4 or 5
| tabs.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| When you notice Brave slowing down, check > More Tools >
| Task Manager in the browser to see which process(es) in
| particular are responsible. We're always happy to chat
| about how we can improve. Thanks!
| retzkek wrote:
| > I just want to browse the web
|
| Do you run an ad blocker? If so you mean you want to browse the
| web ad-free, as many people do. The crypto stuff you don't
| understand is the killer feature for Brave.
|
| Instead of seeing ads everywhere, you can automatically
| contribute a small (configurable) amount to sites you spend
| time on, based on how much time you spend there. Come across an
| interesting or helpful article on someone's blog? Just click
| the button on your toolbar and give the owner a tip. Same thing
| to support a GitHub project you find particularly useful.
| bsclifton wrote:
| Have you given it a try? The crypto-currency parts are optional
| (you have to actually enable them). Brave has got a solid
| adblocker and privacy features out of the box
| smoldesu wrote:
| Google's targeted advertising campaign is also optional, that
| doesn't make me any more comfortable with the fact that it
| exists.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| "Targeting" means something entirely different to Brave
| than it does to Google. Google engages in targeted
| advertising by collecting your data wherever possible.
| Brave doesn't do anything remotely like that. Instead, in
| Brave, the entire Ads component is optional and off by
| default. If/when you opt-in, your data never leaves your
| device. Instead, Brave uses on-device machine-learning to
| determine what types of ads you might be interested in.
| This machine-learning evaluates a regional catalog which is
| routinely downloaded to your machine--the entire process
| happens locally, rather than in the cloud. And, if an ad is
| shown to you, you get 70% of the associated revenue. I
| covered this a bit more in a recent 5-minute talk:
| https://youtu.be/LsrrT502luI
| phreeza wrote:
| I don't quite remember, but wasn't the cliqz search engine
| ranking function somehow built on tracking users, kind of
| contrary to what brave stands for?
| howolduis wrote:
| brave used to redirect users when they visit crypto websites to
| their referral link so they earn money. Do u really trust a
| company that would do that?
| spiderice wrote:
| More than I trust Google, yes. Which is what the overwhelming
| majority of people are using.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Why should I switch to this from DuckDuckGo? What is the value
| proposition here that's somehow greater than it's alternatives
| (DDG, Searx, etc.)?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| DDG is a great search engine, and we are very thankful for the
| movements they've brought about in the private search space.
| That said, Brave is developing its own, distinct index. A
| recent example of what this means is from the "Tank Man"
| results on Bing recently. When Bing returned no results, DDG
| also returned no results. Brave Search, on the other hand,
| continued serving up results. As was stated elsewhere, "we
| aren't beholden to anybody."
| Dah00n wrote:
| So when Brave use Bing as a third-party and Bing censors a
| result like tank man, how do you make sure it doesn't change
| anything at Brave? How does Brave ensure that what is pulled
| in from a third-party is 100% censorship free?
|
| For example a search of "brave bat controversy" gives me the
| exact same top results on Brave search and Bing search. Are
| you saying this is not pulled from Bing?
| tomcooks wrote:
| Very curious on how this is going to work, especially
| advertisement-wise
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I'd be really shocked if it didn't tie to BAT in the Brave
| Browser, but I am definitely curious what they'll do for people
| who use it with other browsers.
| izzytcp wrote:
| Just like their Ads -> BAT
| 55555 wrote:
| They say it's their own index. That's amazing if true (I
| wouldn't put it past them to lie). It's super fast and the
| results (formatting, snippets, etc) look a lot like Google.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| What reason would we have to lie? Thank you for the kind
| words and support otherwise Please do let us know if there is
| ever anything we can do for you.
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| I imagine they will utilize the Basic Attention Token for
| search ads, in a similar fashion to the rest of their
| advertising.
|
| From the page:
|
| ---
|
| > Will I see Brave ads in Brave Search beta? What about Brave
| Rewards?
|
| > We're currently thinking through different search experiences
| to offer our users. Some want a premium, ad-free search
| experience. Others want a free, ad-supported model. We think
| choice is best. Brave Ads with rewards is definitely possible,
| once we're ready to take on the challenge of privacy-protected
| search ads.
|
| ---
| schmorptron wrote:
| Right, their current browser ads seem to promise privacy by
| doing some floc-like thing on-device and preloading a bunch
| of ads to potentially show so the server doesn't know which
| ones were shown. Doing that for a website seems a bit
| different, but I don't see an issue with the DDG model of
| doing some very basic targeting based only on the current
| search term.
| andyxor wrote:
| interesting paper by Brave search team:
|
| "GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web"
| https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Shorter URL for anybody wanting to share:
| https://brave.com/goggles/
| necessities wrote:
| About a year ago I tried a few different web browsers (chrome,
| safari, firefox, and brave) to see which had the best user
| experience and which one I thought had the most value to add to
| me as a user. I settled on Brave because;
|
| 1. I don't have to install a adblocker or any third party
| extensions out of the gate. - Third party ones never seem to do
| the job on the other browsers.
|
| 2. Their form of rewarding creators is superior, in my opinion,
| to having creators appeal to a ad serving service for support. -
| I also find the rewards from viewing ads amusing and have even
| clicked on a few of the ads.
|
| 3. They seem to be the most engaged project with technology
| trends right now...
|
| I will also mention that their bookmark system works for me. The
| one feature I find to be missing is having the bookmark icons
| stay centered in the bar as they can in safari.
|
| It's not too hard for me to imagine that in ten years 90% of
| users will be using Brave and we will be here again talking about
| another new web browser on the scene shaking things up from the
| Brave status quo (instead of how we are with google).
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words and support! Please do let us know
| if there is ever anything we can do for you.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It would be very difficult for Brave to become the "browser
| status quo" without advertisers finding new ways to enforce
| dark patterns or otherwise abusive systems.
|
| Advertising is a bigger business than selling browsers.
| zanethomas wrote:
| Also interesting search for 'jan 6' and compare. It seems Brave
| and Google return similar results which differ from Bing and
| Duckduckgo, which resemble each other.
| calpaterson wrote:
| This seems to be quick and gives decent results for what I tried!
| Very promising!
|
| Going to try setting it as the default...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I believe that in the address bar you should get an icon to set
| the current site as a search provider when you're on it. On
| Firefox it's in the more menu at the right end of the bar.
| calpaterson wrote:
| It looks to me that that is currently broken due to
| https://search.brave.com/auth/assets/opensearch.xml
| redirecting to https://search.brave.com/. I haven't managed
| it on Firefox yet
| w0ts0n wrote:
| Edit: Try now, fix is out.
|
| we are working on pushing a fix out shortly. Stay tuned.
| calpaterson wrote:
| Sorted! Thanks!
| azinman2 wrote:
| I search to ask if brave built their own index. Relevant
| results up top, then I'm getting CNN article about Fox's right
| word shift, and all kinds of other completely unrelated items.
| Incidentally they all were interesting sounding (clickbait) and
| I found myself reaching these unrelated articles. It was a bit
| like browsing Reddit, except this is a search engine and I had
| a very specific yes/no question.
| louffoster wrote:
| I've been using it as default for few weeks. No complaints
| c-fe wrote:
| When I search for "uva", all the first results point to
| university of virginia, instead or university of amsterdam, even
| though the latter has more students, is older and higher ranked.
| The former does not even contain uva in their URL while the
| latter is uva.nl. From a neutral, international point of view,
| why should this Virginia school rank higher in searches than UVA?
|
| Situatiouns like these are what ultimately led me to switch from
| Duckduckgo back to google, and i test these things everytime I
| consider a new search. What is the use of privacy if the search
| results are not relevant to me?
| __ka wrote:
| The chosen country is important. `uva` may be more commonly
| associated with the University of Virginia in the US. For
| Netherlands (same query)
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=uva&country=nl will correctly
| point to Universiteit van Amsterdam.
|
| At present we default to country US. We're looking to implement
| better defaults soon.
|
| We do hope you stick around!
| c-fe wrote:
| Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to address my
| problem, however me having to change the country manually
| sounds like an additional workaround. I wish you the best
| luck though with your search!
| the_other wrote:
| The whole point of DDG is to respect privacy. That means
| knowing as little about its users as possible. The country
| select actually improves the (impression of) privacy for
| me.
| prepend wrote:
| More privacy-oriented search is a good thing, I think.
|
| I'd like more details on what they mean by private.
|
| I do like that they have a metric for what's independent vs
| personalized and I think that will help reduce the "I did Google
| it and my top result conflicts with what you told me" type
| frustrations, https://search.brave.com/help/independence
| Maksadbek wrote:
| It is yet another indexer or yandex :)
| isoskeles wrote:
| If they add bang operators, I might trial switching over from
| ddg.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| We have them today
| btdmaster wrote:
| It seems there is telemetry, sending the day, OS and browser type
| (among other things I cannot identify) by POST:
| https://archive.is/0NTrt
|
| It seems it can be disabled in the settings
| (https://search.brave.com/settings) but it's opt-out rather than
| opt-in.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| This is rather annoying, hopefully it will be opt in once the
| beta is over.
| mark_mcnally_je wrote:
| How have they gotten there search results?
| Dah00n wrote:
| While they don't seem to want to mention the name this is
| Cliqz.com mixed with Bing.com
| 55555 wrote:
| "Even supposedly "neutral" or "private" search engines rely on
| big tech for results. Brave is different. We deliver results
| based on our own built-from-scratch index. We're beholden to no
| one."
| kypro wrote:
| Why is this?
|
| I get that it's not easy to build a _good_ search engine, but
| on the surface it doesn 't seem to be that hard a technical
| problem to solve either. Is it simply that the R&D required
| to build something competitive is too high for most
| companies?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| There are tons of hurdles. For example, many major websites
| will block you if you are not a crawler owned by a few
| companies. They have to be in Google's index to survive,
| but that doesn't mean they allow everyone else to copy
| their content.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| I guess you can get 90% of the way, but the remaining 10%
| becomes really hard unless you're Google scale. But even
| several 90% alternatives would be better than absolute
| monopoly.
| Yoric wrote:
| Do not forget that Brave (the browser) was
| designed/marketed as part of the US Culture Wars, basically
| as a Firefox-but-for-Conservatives.
|
| Brave (the search engine) apparently follows the same
| strategy. The reason for having this index is basically
| political. Brave doesn't want to be impacted by Google or
| Bing's editorial choices. Of course, Brave Search will
| certainly be doing its own editorial choices.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Brave is just a browser. It exists to empower the user,
| regardless of their personal politics. On "editorial
| choices," we've proposed Goggles, which you can read more
| about at https://brave.com/goggles.
| ramesh1994 wrote:
| I think it is definitely a hard problem to solve on a large
| scale to address latency, quality and size of the index
| they plan to address. It definitely isn't as easy as
| spinning up an elastic search cluster.
|
| I agree that getting something "mostly" good or a domain
| specific search engine isn't as hard with the newest
| advances in this space with vector similarity indices.
| whydoyoucare wrote:
| I still prefer Iridium with its Quant search engine.
| drannex wrote:
| Qwant really has been a lovely search engine, highly suggest it
| for anyone looking for something better than DDG.
| swader999 wrote:
| Brave browser on android doesn't let me set it as default search
| yet. Maybe I need an update.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Same here. Latest version. Kinda ironic.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| We'll have this fixed soon; apologies for the inconvenience.
| TheFreim wrote:
| I use Brave on android and I was able to set it. I think you
| have to do a search (or possibly go to settings on the site? I
| forget) and THEN follow the steps to add it. I thought there
| was an issue for a while but then I managed to get it set just
| fine.
| threatofrain wrote:
| How does Brave plan to handle relations with law enforcement and
| their requests? Will Brave offer a mechanism to uniquely identify
| the most offensive users?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Not sure what you're referring to here; Brave doesn't have any
| user data. We don't collect it to begin with. We believe in
| _Can 't be Evil_ over _Don 't be Evil_.
| meibo wrote:
| Yet, you have no way to prove it - or is this product
| completely open source?
|
| Additionally, I believe OP was referring to requests for
| removal of search results that contain personal information.
| Both Google and Bing support these and will remove results in
| accordance with GDPR.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I'm really just asking for those who search up "criminal"
| content, as I remember Google being asked to give up the IP
| addresses of those who searched under a term in a specific
| region at a specific time -- but that still meant thousands
| of addresses.
|
| But I think your case is also worth adding to the
| conversation, although I don't believe removing results
| collides with privacy.
| maverick74 wrote:
| Yeah yeah.
|
| Let me put it this way: if it's an opensource search engine
| you'll have me for sure.
|
| If it's not 100% opensource then I can't be sure you don't
| track me and we end up in the google cage again.
| Dah00n wrote:
| If you return a result that came from Bing and law
| enforcement want it gone (because it is illegal for whatever
| reason) do Brave remove it from the results or do Bing? Both
| have problems but I'd like to know which route Brave take.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Well. When I google myself, I find one page entirely of me,
| engineer from East Europe. When I Brave-search myself, I find my
| namesake from Ohio that died in 1919.
|
| But, I learned something new about Cleveland Ohio in early 20th
| century, so I guess it's not that bad.
| open-paren wrote:
| Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say
| covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index,
| it will then get it from Google or Bing.
|
| I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably
| aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and
| Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking
| algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.
| evdoks wrote:
| Check this recent podcast with Brave's founder, where, among
| other things, he is talking about how the search is
| implemented: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/modern-
| finance/id13386...
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| Non-Apple link
|
| https://www.modern.finance/brave-browser/
| bleachedsleet wrote:
| Never heard of this show before, but it got a new subscriber
| out of me. Thanks for the link to this!
| Zhyl wrote:
| In December '19 the company that would end up being acquired by
| Brave did a number of blog posts [0] where they explained the
| tech. The short answer is 'a lot of word2vec'.
|
| [0] https://www.0x65.dev/
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| why is Brave calling them Tailcat? The company was Cliqz, not
| Tailcat.
| surround wrote:
| I think Cliqz's search engine was called Tailcat
| amjd wrote:
| Cliqz had closed last year. The team went on to create a
| new product called Tailcut, which Brave acquired.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Word2vec has its limitations... I assume by now they've
| trained their own GPT-3-like model on the data...
| x4e wrote:
| Funny how their posts show such a different approach to their
| browser than Braves. E.g. forking Firefox not Chromium,
| implementing functionality as extension instead of in browser
| where possible...
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| > If all browsers end up using Blink (Google), the Web will
| suffer as developers will only optimize and test for the
| Blink rendering engine.
|
| Am I the only one that thinks that this would be a good
| thing? Like the entire industry sharing the same core open
| source technology? Write a website once and it works
| perfectly across all platforms?
| toyg wrote:
| Chromium is _nominally_ open source - in practice it 's
| controlled by Google employees in any way that matters.
| So you would literally be handing full control over the
| web-experience to Google.
| aembleton wrote:
| Nothing would stop it being forked. If for example,
| Microsoft wanted something added then they could fork it;
| add their code and use that in Edge.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| Nothing stops them but considering they've gone the route
| of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" after fighting for
| so long, I doubt they're likely to diverge significantly
| at this stage.
| maverick74 wrote:
| You surely are too young to remember the IE6 shithole
| monopoly we were all in when - MOZILLA - ALONE saved us.
|
| It's not that having a common rendering engine for
| everyone would be bad. What's bad is having 1 company (or
| a few) for-profit companies controlling that rendering
| engine.
|
| They don't give a shit about you!
| x4e wrote:
| > all platforms
|
| Chrome doesn't even support all platforms. It probably
| wouldn't run on my car's display for example. If the web
| followed an open standard that wouldn't be a problem: the
| car manufacturer could make their own browser.
|
| And not everyone wants to use chrome/blink because the
| development is in practice entirely run my google who do
| not have consumer interests in mind.
| hawski wrote:
| This site works best in IE6 at 800x600.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Those were the days! I was just explaining to my children
| yesterday how computer games were played in 640x480 when
| I was their age. I remember designing websites for that
| resolution too; still impresses me what we were able to
| do with so few pixels, lol.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Problem is, this means ceding what amounts to control of
| the browser, and so, the internet experience, to a
| privacy invasive megacorp.
|
| Were it a nonprofit trust, I'd be right there with you.
| But not a for-profit company, and sure as HELL not
| _Google_.
| rglullis wrote:
| No monopoly or monoculture, even if open source, is good.
| It is not just about the features that you think makes
| your life better, you have also to consider the potential
| catastrophic bugs that could be exploited and leave
| everyone without an alternative.
|
| Evolution only happens when there is divergence and
| competition.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Well we're already effectively at monoculture. The only
| other rendering engine that has any meaningful market
| share is Apple's fork of Webkit.
|
| I disagree that with the proposition that a single open
| source project with broad industry representation would
| hinder evolution.
|
| Companies like Google and Microsoft don't compete on
| their ability to support the various web specs, but on
| quality of the web applications they can deliver to
| customers. Competition in this space will continue to
| drive innovation even with a single agreed upon rendering
| engine.
|
| It would, however, limit the ability of a company like
| Apple to hobble their only-supported browser such that
| web apps can't compete with native ones.
| rglullis wrote:
| > market share
|
| If there is at least one alternative that is significant,
| then by definition it's not "effectively a monoculture".
|
| In any case, market share is the least important factor
| here. As long as we have an intolerant minority
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262240) that does
| not want be subject to Chromium as the only open source
| project, we will be fine.
|
| Mozilla is screwing up badly, and I switched to Brave
| mostly because I believe that they are building a
| stronger artillery to fight surveillance capitalism (as
| in, Mozilla gives you wishy-washy feel-good words, Brave
| gives you money), but this does not mean that Mozilla
| needs to go away. Quite the opposite: I still hope that
| we see a "Next acquires Apple for negative $400 million"
| story. If Firefox builds integration with Brave's network
| and also adopts BAT, I would go back to it in a
| heartbeat.
|
| > I disagree that (...) would hinder evolution.
| Competition in this space will continue to drive
| innovation even with a single agreed upon rendering
| engine.
|
| God, no! The worrying thing is not that the development
| of the web specs would stagnate. The problem is that the
| development would only happen in the direction that
| benefits them and that they would be completely
| unchecked.
| aloisdg wrote:
| > Evolution only happens when there is divergence and
| competition.
|
| Not when we can a have a logic stable and well made
| standard. Like the metric system. I am pretty sure that I
| would have a problem with any alternative to the metric
| system. The more we are to use it the better it become.
|
| Evolution can and thrive through cooperation and mutual
| aid. I would be fine with having one standard
| implementation of a browser engine if it was not rule by
| a greedy corporate like Google, Apple or Microsoft.
| Karunamon wrote:
| The problem there is that metric basically equates to
| math at the end of the day, I don't think those are
| directly comparable. It would be very strange (and new)
| to have one and only one implementation of an entire
| class of software, instead of a technical standard with
| multiple different implementations.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| Depends mostly on the terms you choose to evaluate it.
| Certainly that is one upside, but the downsides are
| pretty clear as well. Chromium is an open-source base but
| it is still very much spearheaded and dragged by the
| whims of Google, and if there is no other game in town
| they have even less of a reason to avoid decision that
| might not be in the best interest of users.
|
| Additionally, you lose even more meaningful competition
| that drives improvement. Obviously you don't lose it all
| as your different chromium flavors do implement different
| bells and whistles but those are much narrower in scope.
|
| It continues to be ironic and concerning that Firefox
| exists at the whims of Google paying to be the default
| search, but in some ways that helps them with potential
| antitrust cases as well. I think we have a lot more to
| lose than gain if we fully collapse into a Blink/Chromium
| singularity.
| toytoyr wrote:
| Sounds like they built their index by collecting Google
| search queries done by the users of their browser extension.
| Suddenly Brave's "completely independent index" doesn't sound
| quite as impressive.
|
| https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-05/a-new-search-
| engine.htm...
| open-paren wrote:
| I found the announcement blog post. Brave Search is a
| rebranding of Tailcat's product, which Brave acquired in March.
|
| https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| @dang, this seems like a good candidate to replace the
| current link of this post.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I still wouldn't use it since it falls back to Bing or Google.
| vmullin wrote:
| Fallback can be turned off with an easy toggle in the
| settings: https://search.brave.com/settings
| jonathansampson wrote:
| You're referring to _Fallback Mixing_ , which is off by
| default. You have to enable it in
| https://search.brave.com/settings. When enabled, this feature
| will (at times) pull in results from Google via an anonymous
| query, routed through the browser. Read more about it here:
| https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback
| counternotions wrote:
| What incentive do Google and Bing have to share free SERP
| data to Brave in an anonymous channel?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| They aren't sharing it with Brave directly, but rather
| with users. The query is issued via the participating
| user's Brave instance. This data then supplements what
| Brave Search has found, and assists Brave Search in
| presenting better results to that user, and others, in
| the future.
| gundmc wrote:
| This sounds like a dishonest way of bypassing payment for
| Google search API by impersonating a request from a user.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| It's still a request from the user; the user consents to
| issuing these requests on behalf of Brave Search when
| they opt-in to Fallback Mixing. Anybody can issue calls
| to Google's search engine.
| freediver wrote:
| Doesn't this get the user directly in violation of
| Google's TOS which prevents automated queries against it?
| twiddlebits wrote:
| I don't see a fallback mixing option on that page. Is it
| called 'Fallback Mixing' on that settings page? Also, these
| results are pulled from google and bing it seems for every
| query I do. seems like maybe some reranking is happening.
| And the query completions are from Bing. So you are sending
| everybody's queries to third parties. Not very private.
| andai wrote:
| > Note that choosing this option has no effect on your
| privacy. If you happen to have a Google account, Google
| will not be able to associate your query with this account.
|
| I'm confused about "routed through the browser" -- is the
| browser talking to Google directly, but without sending the
| login cookies, and then hoping Google doesn't associate
| searches from your IP with your identity?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Correct, a query is issued from your browser but without
| any cookies. While it's true your IP address tags along
| for the ride, the IP address isn't typically how users
| are tracked on Google-scale properties. Due to NAT and
| more, your IP address is not exclusively yours. It can
| represent many people at once, and over time. That said,
| if you are not comfortable with the idea of _Fallback
| Mixing_ , you do not need to enable the feature.
| freediver wrote:
| At the very least I suggest modifying the text on the
| page as it is misleading. > Note that
| choosing this option has no effect on your privacy.
|
| IP address is definitely considered private information
| even at court level.
|
| https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-
| confirms-...
| cortexio wrote:
| Well.. it kinda isnt. If your IP would be private you
| CANNOT use the internet. You just cant. If you use a VPN,
| you share your IP with the VPN. So you ALWAYS have to
| share your IP with someone for anything you do on the
| internet. So it cant be private.. it just cant.
|
| There are 2 things u can do, either use a VPN and only
| share your IP with them, but then brave will also use
| your vpn when sending info to google, so your IP is safe
| in this case..
|
| Or option 2 is that you watch out for the things u make
| connection to. Which is literally impossible. Visit any
| popular website and your IP gets sent all over place in
| the background, mostly towards CDNs or analytic
| platforms. But yeah, the brave feature is an opt-in.. so
| u kinda give your consent there.
|
| IP addresses are not exclussive to the internet, they
| also exist within local networks at home or office etc,
| people refer to your IP address when using the internet
| as your "Public IP address".
|
| That being said, it's not nice when people are spreading
| around your IP address. It's much the same as people
| sharing your home address. Companies should indeed not be
| allowed to just give this information away to other
| companies. But brave isnt doing this, as long it's an
| opt-in it's your own choice.
| bleachedsleet wrote:
| It does not appear that they are exposing all possible
| settings configs on mobile as fallback mixing is not shown
| as an option for me there. This seems like an oversight to
| me.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Fallback Mixing is only available to Brave on desktop and
| Android at this time. Apologies for any confusion.
| 1_player wrote:
| Why is it only available on Brave? Doesn't make any
| sense.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Because you cannot issue a cross-site request to Google
| from the client due to CORS policies. This feature
| required work in the Brave browser itself, so that the
| application would serve as a pipeline for the request on
| behalf of the search page itself.
| Seirdy wrote:
| This has not been my experience. Comparing results with
| Google, Startpage, and a Searx instance with only Google
| enabled reveals that the results are almost always from
| Google. Sometimes they merge multiple results that share a
| domain.
|
| I decided to add them to the "Semi-Independent" category of
| my collection of indexing search engines:
| https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-
| indexe...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Interesting. I couldn't reproduce those results. Certain
| queries did produce _very_ identical results, but others
| did not. In some of those cases Google and Startpage did
| better.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Even semi-independant seems generous. I probably would
| have just lumped them in with Google or Bing.
| Seirdy wrote:
| Some queries do actually return independent results, but
| the vast majority (in my experience) do not.
| solso wrote:
| Mixing with Google results only can happen after opt-in
| and only in Brave browser. You can see if a single query
| has been mixed clicking on the `Info`, or check the
| independence metrics on the `Settings` tab.
|
| The fact that you see results similar to Google for
| popular queries is a by-product of the fact that our
| ranking is trained using anonymous query-log. There is
| plenty of references to the methodology
| (https://0x65.dev/).
|
| The fact that we are similar to Google on certain types
| of queries, is good (at from the perspective of human
| assessment). It's easy to find other types of queries for
| which we are not similar to Google. It would be rather
| stupid if we were to "use google" on easy to solve
| queries but not on the complicated ones, don't you think?
| In any case, very nice article besides a couple of miss-
| conceptions (like this one), will bookmark.
|
| Disclaimer: work at Brave search, used to work at Cliqz
| Seirdy wrote:
| That makes a bit more sense; I just read the blog posts.
| I'm concerned about the effects of optimizing against
| Google (namely, the extremely similar results); I don't
| think I understand the point of an alternative if it
| tries to replicate a competitor to this degree. The whole
| idea I was going for in that article was a diversity of
| information sources: if one engine isn't giving the
| results you want, try another.
|
| Right now, users who want Google results and privacy can
| use a Searx instance or Startpage.
|
| I updated the article to fix the inaccuracy. Diff: https:
| //git.sr.ht/~seirdy/seirdy.one/commit/ddeeb36248ce5318...
|
| Any other fact-checks are welcome.
| solso wrote:
| You bring a very good point on the diversity of
| information sources, which is something we plan to attack
| in the near future with open ranking [0]
|
| In my opinion having similar results to Google will
| facilitate adoption. After all, Google is pretty good for
| many types of queries (not all), and people in general
| have strong habits.
|
| The fact that we are similar with our own index is great.
| It means that we have the power of deviating from it when
| needed, as we mature/evolve.
|
| Allow me to repurposed your statement on why not use
| startpage if you want Google-like results: if tomorrow
| Google disappears (or for some reason becomes unusable),
| brave search will continue to operate as normal (similar
| to old Google). What will happen to searx or startpage?
| What till happen to ddg or swisscows if the provider
| turning bad is Microsoft. IMHO, no matter how much
| reranking or nice features they you put on top, unless
| you do not control the search results themselves,
| diversity can only be superficial.
|
| Sorry for the "rant". Thanks a lot for the inputs and for
| updating the doc, appreciate it.
|
| [0] https://brave.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Brave Search doesn't fall-back to Google; not unless you
| have enabled _Fallback Mixing_ in
| https://search.brave.com/settings/. Brave Search has its
| own index; the results may resemble those of other
| engines at times, but they aren't pulled from those
| engines (again, noting the exception of _Fallback Mixing_
| , an optional feature offered to the user via Settings).
| Seirdy wrote:
| I'm testing on Firefox and the Tor browser right now, JS
| disabled. I also disabled cookies in Firefox. Searches
| for "Seirdy", "Neovim", "gccgo", and others return
| results _identical_ to Google, Startpage, and Searx
| instances with only Google enabled. No other independent
| engine of all the 25 other English independently-indexing
| engines I compared in the article has had this happen;
| identical pages on all the other engines are nearly
| impossible to find for advanced /uncommon queries.
|
| 90% of queries being identical to Google but different
| from the 25 other independent engines is one hell of a
| coincidence.
|
| Archived example:
|
| Brave results for "gccgo": https://web.archive.org/web/20
| 210622172743/https://search.br...
|
| Google results for "gccgo" (proxied through Startpage): h
| ttps://web.archive.org/web/20210622172939/https://startpa
| ge...
|
| If this is a bug, it's very serious and needs to be
| publicly disclosed.
|
| Edit: more examples:
|
| Brave results for "oppenheimer": https://web.archive.org/
| web/20210622173647/https://search.br...
|
| Google results for "Oppenheimer" (proxied through
| Startpage): https://web.archive.org/web/20210622173658/ht
| tps://startpage...
| iudqnolq wrote:
| As a counterexample, I searched for something very
| obscure (only three pages on startpage) expecting to see
| them pulling in results from startpage to cover the long
| tail. I was surprised to see different results,
| suggesting their index is much larger than I assumed.
|
| The query was "retail snap incentive program"
|
| Edit: All your queries are for relatively popular terms.
| I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right
| top set of pages.
| mkl wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right
| top set of pages.
|
| I would be astounded! Why would DDG, Bing, etc. not use
| it? Different search indices and engines should
| practically always have differences in results, as
| ranking results is very fuzzy and dependent on the
| available data.
| croddin wrote:
| If that is the case, what search engine do you currently use?
| x4e wrote:
| What search engine would you use then? This is what pretty
| much every alternative search engine does...
| andai wrote:
| Try our new Google alternative!
|
| * Powered by Google
| cj wrote:
| Presumably the fallback happens server side, and presumably
| the google/bing queries are cloaked so your IP isn't making
| it to google/bing.
|
| Curious why you wouldn't use bing/google even if your queries
| are "proxied" through Brave servers? (Assuming Brave isn't
| also sending your IP, etc, when they submit the query to
| google/bing)
| wutbrodo wrote:
| What do you use? Doesn't DDG use Bing as well?
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| I just tested an image search on Bing
| (https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=test) and Brave Search
| (https://search.brave.com/images?q=test) and it definitely
| appears that Brave is falling back to Bing as the results are
| highly identical, especially compared to Google
| (https://www.google.com/search?q=test).
| fatboy wrote:
| They mention that image search is 100% bing. Not sure if
| this is planned to be replaced by their own implementation
| later.
|
| "However for some features, like searching for images,
| Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing."
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Indeed, we lean heavily on Bing for image search. With
| time and maturation, this will change I'm sure. That
| said, when Bing lacked "tank man" results recently, Brave
| Search still yielded results (although the quality wasn't
| what we'd like to see; still a beta product. Screenshots
| here: https://twitter.com/BraveSampson/status/14009262074
| 16410113). Crawl, walk, run. We're just getting started
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| So, note that Brave brought in the Cliqz/Tailcat team to build
| this: While it's a "new search engine", I'm guessing the data
| and algorithms they were working on previously have all made it
| into this project at some point. Cliqz launched in 2015, so
| there's a number of years of work put in.
| ramesh1994 wrote:
| I would also highly recommend the blog post series [1] from
| Cliqz talking about the tech behind the search.
|
| [1] - https://0x65.dev/
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I was involved with the cliqz search engine and used their
| browser for a while. Great people with excellent integrity.
| maverick74 wrote:
| Very sad about what happened. Had very high hopes for you
| guys (more than from brave).
|
| I know TailCat is open source... But what about Brave
| Search? Any clue?
| [deleted]
| freediver wrote:
| Few problems here:
|
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=who+is+the+mayor+of+palo+a...
|
| - Mayor is Tom DuBois. Name does not appear anywhere in results.
|
| - Seems that Brave should not be relying on Wikidata as the
| highlighted result is wrong
|
| - The wiki "box" on the side also looks a bit broken
| pythux wrote:
| Thanks! We'll have a look at this one. This is definitely
| broken.
| float4 wrote:
| What is the roadmap for localisation? I tried some queries that
| should give localised results, but they yield terrible results
| (just like DDG does).
| cweagans wrote:
| I really cannot understand why people go through the effort of
| building manual light/dark mode toggles in websites these days. I
| already set it system-wide. Just default to what I already
| specified. I see it all over the place and it boggles my mind
| when the user's preference is just a media query away.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I haven't implemented a client-side setting on my sites yet,
| but it's in the plans. I can tell you why I plan to do it, and
| also why I test with no-JS support and in text-mode browsers,
| implement status indicators and back-to-top buttons, and why I
| consider Netscape 2.0 a first-class citizen on my domains.
|
| Sure, the user-agent "should" provide all of that stuff, but
| the reality is that most don't have all the features I would
| want as a visitor to my site, so I have to bend over backwards
| to accommodate their specific abilities.
|
| The user-experience is a combination of three abilities: the
| ability of the user, the ability of the user-agent, and the
| ability of the Web site. Combined together they form the
| ACCESS-ABILITY landscape.
| jtdev wrote:
| I've been using it. Seems like a solid search engine.
| Interestingly, Google appeared to be censoring results yesterday
| to hide reports about an unfortunate shooting at a Juneteenth
| event in Oakland and a subsequent situation where a crowd of
| people were blocking an ambulance from exiting the area of the
| shooting with wounded victims. Let's just say the story didn't
| play well to Google's political base... so they hid it. Brave
| search provided unfiltered/uncensored results.
| isoskeles wrote:
| Do events show up on Google _search_ that quickly, and in turn,
| get censored that quickly?
|
| I saw the video of what you are referring to on Twitter. Just
| searched on Google, "alameda twerking", and the first four
| results I see are for this incident.
| jtdev wrote:
| Well I'd be interested in hearing how Brave search was able
| to surface results faster than Google yesterday... YouTube
| (another Alphabet echo chamber) was/is also removing video of
| the ambulance incident, so it was definitely on the big tech
| thought police radar.
| Dah00n wrote:
| They get it from Bing.
| matchbok wrote:
| I can find that story on google just fine. Please take your
| right-wing conspiracies back to 4chan bud.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| I'm wondering how this censoring process you envision actually
| played out at Google. Like did an executive tell an underling
| to hide this information from the world? I'm genuinely curious.
| enumjorge wrote:
| I'm also curious what Google's "political base" is, since
| they're apparently getting final say on the search results. I
| keep getting Pinterest on my image searches and maybe the
| political base can help.
| jtdev wrote:
| Do you believe that Google doesn't engage in censoring search
| results? Do you know that YouTube was taking down the video
| of said incident yesterday and continues to do so today?
| https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/02/09/google-quietly-
| esc...
| matchbok wrote:
| Breitbart is not news, it's white nationalist facist
| garbage. If you think anything on that site is reliable,
| please go get educated. You providing "evidence" from there
| is embarrassing.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Hiding a news story like this specific example? No, I do
| not believe Google did that. Not for a second. That is
| absurd.
|
| How they handle possible spammers, people posting dangerous
| medical advice, etc is a bit different, no? I'm not letting
| them off the hook entirely, but this example is simply
| ridiculous. What benefit would they get from it, and at
| what risk? (i.e. disgruntled employee blows the whistle on
| their behavior)
|
| And really, Breitbart? Omg.
| nmx- wrote:
| Do you have other sources than breitbart?
| jtdev wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/15/google-tweaks-its-
| algorithm-...
| throwitaway1235 wrote:
| They all know Google search employs censorship, they just
| rather lie to your face.
|
| I almost forgot about the blacklist! https://www.usnews.c
| om/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is...
| zzyzxd wrote:
| Previous related discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758
|
| If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-
| tracking search engine. I can't express how exciting this is to
| me.
|
| Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace
| Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I
| always ended up changing the default search engine back to
| Google. I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the
| remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I
| just couldn't stand. I would imagine Brave Search to have similar
| issues, at least in the beginning, but they did something smart
| to make it less painful:
|
| > Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first
| of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously
| check our search results against third-party results, and mix
| them on the results page.
|
| So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result is
| on the same page, or just one click away.
| howolduis wrote:
| so you're saying it would be better then DDG just because u r
| paying money for it?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free,
| zero-tracking search engine."
|
| In 1998 when Google's founders announced their search engine
| they claimed it would be less commercial, more academic, more
| transparent and they would avoid the influence of advertising.
| Did things "go as planned." Not even close. What is the lesson
| here.
|
| Meanwhile, every search submitted during the "beta" period is
| subject to none of those limitations.
|
| "So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result
| is on the same page, or just one click away."
|
| Brave is not the first to do that. Check out Gigablast, for
| example. If I am not mistaken, they also claim to use an
| "independent index". At least, they provide the source to a
| crawler and server.^1 That is what people should be excited
| about. Not Gigablast per se but the idea of an open source
| search engine that anyone can run. searx is another project
| worth looking at.^2
|
| How many ways are results promoted and demoted; what are the
| factors used. Are these search engines that comenters are
| recommending in this thread transparent. (Making promises on a
| blog is not "transparency" IMO.) Where is the source code. What
| are the various server settings that alternatives like Google,
| DDG, Brave, Startpage, etc. never provide to users. This stuff
| should matter, yet the discussion of search engines always
| seems to devolve into personal usage anecdotes and "search
| shortcuts". Every user has different needs and preferences.
|
| There are many knobs in web search that advertising-supporting
| tech companies providing "search engine" websites will never
| let users twiddle. The source code for those servers is not
| public.
|
| 1. To get an idea of type of settings users of popular search
| engines are not being allowed to control:
|
| (Scroll down to "SEARCH CONTROLS")
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gigablast/open-source-sear...
|
| 2. https://github.com/searx/searx
|
| For a current list of searx public instances
| curl https://searx.space/data/instances.json|grep -Eo '(A\+",
| .[^"]*.{4}[^"]*)'|cut -d/ -f5|uniq|sed 's>.*>https://&>'
| gigamatt wrote:
| hi, gigablast creator, matt, here. thanks for mentioning
| gigablast. i've been coding web search engines for almost 25
| years so it's always nice to see ppl recognize. i wish more
| ppl would care about these things. with enough people caring
| i think i (or we) could make gigablast into a super
| transparent, private search engine that doesn't rely on big
| tech like the other guys. really i just need more hardware at
| this point as that is the main technical hurdle for improving
| results quality and performance. if somebody would give me
| like $1M in amd-based minicomputers (i like minicomputers
| better than big servers - preferably asus) i think we could
| have something much better and faster, although what is there
| is pretty good -- this might be enough to really get things
| going.
| yewenjie wrote:
| > searx
|
| I just gave the docker image a try. It works out of the box
| but the search time feels slightly more than that of Google -
| which is one of the reasons I gave up on DDG.
|
| Also, I am curious - if I am hosting it on my own server and
| using Google as one of the engines - does that not mean my
| search ultimately goes to Google and they can still profile
| me?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I just tested the 47 servers listed in
| https://searx.space/data/instances.json. I did not use a
| browser. No Javascript, cookies, etc.. A good number of
| them worked fine.
|
| Who knows what the people running those instances do with
| the search data they acquire.
|
| What I like about searx though is the list of search
| engines it potentially targets. Comprehensive lists of
| search engines on the internet are always valuable. I see
| searx as a supply of "parts" with which one can make
| something of their own. I have made a metasearch utility
| for myself.
| yewenjie wrote:
| What does your metasearch approach look like?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| A. Text-only
|
| B. Search from command line
|
| C. Can open an index.html of saved search results in any
| browser; each query gets its own SERP; search results are
| saved in a directory that can be tarballed and compressed
| allowing simple transfer to any computer with a UNIX
| userland
|
| D. Easy to add new sites; follows a failry standard
| template; currently at only eight sites, but adding more
| (like the ones in searx)
|
| E. Requires only standard UNIX utilities; consists of
| small shell scripts of less than 2000 chars
|
| F. Fast; no cruft
|
| Unique features:
|
| 1. Streamlined SERP; URLs only, minimal HTML, i.e., <a>,
| <pre>, <ol>, <li>, <!-- -->; no images, Javascript or
| CSS; SERP contains timestamps in HTML comments to
| indicate when each query was submitted
|
| 2. Each SERP contains deduped batches of results from
| different search engines; source search engine indicated
| by short prefix; if desired, can resort to intersperse
| results from different sources, e.g., sort by URL
|
| 3. Continuation of search; allows retrieval 100s of
| results by spreading searches across periods of time too
| long for websites to track, thus allowing retrieval of
| large numbers of search results while avoiding
| ridiculously small result limits or temporary bans for
| "searching too fast" <--- I could not find anyone else
| using this approach
|
| 4. By default only minimum headers sent; custom headers
| can be sent when appropriate for particular site, e.g.,
| DNT to findx.com; allows for complete customisation of
| presence/absence/content/order/case of HTTP headers, thus
| can potentially emulate any browser or other HTTP client
| (also supports HTTP/1.1 pipelining which curl cannot do)
|
| 5. Can be used with any TCP client; not limited to one
| library, e.g., libcurl; works great with proxies like
| stunnel and haproxy
|
| 6. URL params or hidden form fields that can potentially
| be used to link one SERP with another SERP are removed or
| rendered ineffective
| Naracion wrote:
| For the other 5% of the time, use the !s bang for Startpage.
| Anonymized Google search results, with an option to visit the
| websites on the results page anonymously.
| [deleted]
| lowkeyokay wrote:
| > I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5%
| failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just
| couldn't stand.
|
| Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different
| though. When I don't get the results I hoped I just use !g.
| Easy. But the result are rarely any better
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I tried brave search today and the results were rather good.
| I have no idea what 95% working means but this is a nice
| start
| tobr wrote:
| I used to do this, but at some point I just stopped. Google
| is not better than DDG. More SEO spam and much more hostile
| UX.
|
| Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX too so I don't have
| any big hopes for this. I like the idea of paying for a
| search engine, though. I would seriously consider that if DDG
| offered it.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how you feel "Brave has a culture of
| user-hostile UX"? You're not talking about the first
| version of the User Tipping feature from 2018 (where Brave
| gave BAT to its users and asked them to give mark which
| creator(s) they'd like to support) are you?
| tobr wrote:
| Generally the same type of problems as a lot of UX has
| today, especially on mobile: various messages and modals
| and controls that seem to be motivated by Brave's needs,
| not mine. Sponsored images, trying to get me to set it as
| standard browser, "Brave rewards" whatever that is being
| a permanent part of the UI and turning itself on without
| me asking it to.
|
| These might be small things compared to Google, but I've
| never experienced that DuckDuckGo did anything like it,
| so my trust in them is higher.
| tobr wrote:
| Let me expand a little on why I think this is so
| corrosive to my trust in Brave, because this is
| interesting stuff. When I use the Brave browser, I have
| to second-guess everything in the UI to consider why a
| control or message is there, if it's in my interest or if
| you're trying to get me to do something that's in your
| interest. My eyes have to scan the UI in much the same
| way I do with ads in search results or spam in my inbox;
| having to actively filter out the potential harms from
| the things that are useful.
|
| It's like I can feel my eyes getting more tense as I do
| this.
|
| That means that every single time I use the browser, the
| impression that Brave should not be trusted is reinforced
| in a very _physical_ way. It's not just a "brand
| impression" but a muscle memory.
| burn wrote:
| Why not try Neeva? They are going the route of a paid
| search engine.
| eitland wrote:
| Upvoted, but here is the reason why I don't use it, some
| people haven't yet fully realized that Internet doesn't
| have borders:
|
| > We will be in touch when we are ready to release Neeva
| in your country. Thank you for being part of the Neeva
| team, we are so excited to build the future of search
| with you.
| kmonsen wrote:
| I'm using Neeva. I like the team and the idea, but at
| least for me there is a drastic drop off in search
| quality from google. It is pretty far from 95% as good.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX
|
| Yep. The missteps that they've made over the past few years
| do not give me any confidence in the future of the project.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| What missteps? The only notable UX issue we've had was
| years ago, and was a matter of naive design. When we were
| made aware of the issue, it was corrected within 48
| hours. Hard to portray that as a "culture of hostile UX".
| easrng wrote:
| I'd say only allowing BAT withdrawal to a single hosted
| wallet provider that requires KYC is a pretty significant
| UX issue.
| smaryjerry wrote:
| That's not hostile, it's literally a requirement in the
| US for crypto.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Maybe that's a sign that we should keep our browser and
| crypto wallets as separate entities, no?
| smaryjerry wrote:
| Yea, but I mean who would want to cash out their pennies
| earned anyways. Only businesses/creators should be
| cashing out and they would need to KYC for any normal
| donations. Users should be just donating their pennies to
| creators and websites, which doesn't take any KYC.
| beprogrammed wrote:
| I haven't noticed any UX issues, great job on the
| browser, looking forward to the search engine. Thanks.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| This was only a year ago and not a great look -
| https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
| smoldesu wrote:
| Maybe you could start by listening instead of accosting
| every comment that you find. Your incessant reply-bombing
| is childish and unprofessional, nobody wants to engage
| with someone who defends a browser like it's their sole
| lifeline.
|
| Furthermore, you don't get to choose what your "UX
| issues" are. "UX" quite literally stands for "users
| experience", which is on the other side of the spectrum
| from "developer experience". As a dev myself, I know it's
| difficult not to conflate the two, but acting like issues
| _straight up don 't exist_ is blatantly hostile.
|
| I have no personal qualms against Brave. I'm just another
| developer who wants a browser, and Brave's naive
| featureset doesn't appeal to me: that's fine. I'm just
| helping other, similar users make the right choice.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| I see you put the twit in twitter.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous
| comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so
| I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it
| personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate,
| I'll post a response.
|
| Regarding user experience, I'm not just a developer of
| Brave, but I'm a user also ;-) Not only that, but I spend
| a lot of time speaking with users all across the Web, so
| as to understand how they're using Brave, what works, and
| what doesn't. I do feel uniquely qualified to talk about
| matter of UX when it comes to Brave.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| > I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous
| comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so
| I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it
| personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate,
| I'll post a response.
|
| I'm not posting this in fight mode, I sincerely hope it
| will help: this is user hostile.
|
| You're responding but you're not listening. You're
| certainly not asking. How could you be sure you know what
| the other people you interact with think if you feel
| uniquely qualified to talk about users' experience and
| just brush by people who don't feel supported in their
| own experience?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I don't use Brave but I think these guys are being
| unfair. Your comments are generally fine because they've
| prompted responses with detail, which I as a third party
| prefer.
|
| "Brave is full of UX issues" <<< "Brave allows
| withdrawing BAT to only a single wallet provider".
|
| Okay, the latter comment is way more useful to me, a lay
| follower than the former. And it only happens because you
| pushed.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > I'm responding to users.
|
| I'm gonna have to agree with GP that you're responding
| too much. I don't even use Brave nor do I care but I
| still browse HN. Obviously different people will see
| things differently, but you seem _very_ defensive and it
| makes you come across as difficult.
|
| Like I said, I have no skin in this game. You are welcome
| to ignore what I say if you don't find it helpful.
| slver wrote:
| Jesus why is everyone an armchair psychologist all of a
| sudden. Let the person respond.
|
| Why the fuck is everyone sharing opinions here about
| Brave if they DON'T want Brave to hear and respond?
|
| It disturbs your little perfect echo chamber?
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious what echo chamber you think I'm in.
| The echo chamber where I'm unaware what people think of
| Brave?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Since you seem to know it all I'll just leave you be. My
| only actionable advice is that you should hire someone
| nicer to handle public relations, lest you bleed users
| from your own mouth.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| I do believe I've been quite respectful with you. If at
| any time I was caustic, abrasive, or offensive, I
| apologize. It is certainly not my intention.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| From my read through the thread, you're being very nice,
| but also very dismissive. That's not actually respectful,
| even if it's not the harsh things you describe. And it's
| not kind. If you disagree with someone's experience that
| you feel passionately about defending, you might have
| better luck defending it by taking a moment to think
| about what they experienced differently from your own
| experience, how much you care about that different
| experience, and how you might incorporate that into
| future action. Not everything needs public relations, and
| it can definitely feel uncaring if it's mostly public
| explainings.
| Kiro wrote:
| People are too sensitive nowadays. Everything needs to be
| wrapped silk and the actual information gets shrouded by
| fluff.
| [deleted]
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| It's not clear who you're saying is being too sensitive,
| or why you think so.
| Kiro wrote:
| People who think it's disrespectful when a company
| representative do not preface every response with "I
| deeply apologize that you feel this way" or some
| equivalent nonsense. You even claim responding to
| something inaccurate is user hostile.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Huh? I wasn't suggesting the person should apologize. I
| was suggesting they should ask about the user's
| experience rather than telling it.
| Kiro wrote:
| Or they can just tell them facts instead of pretending to
| care what a random hater thinks. Just like they did. They
| also asked what bad UX they referred to, so they did what
| you wanted but it was still disrespectful apparently. If
| genuine feedback was met with "go fuck yourself" we could
| maybe call it user hostility but this was not.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I feel like pretending to listen, which is what he is
| doing, is worse than saying "go fuck yourself" because
| then it would be honest. I find it bizarre you find his
| feedback genuine, as to me it's the same thing as "go
| fuck yourself" but neatly wrapped up in a "I pretend to
| care what you say" format.
|
| If he came straight out and said "I don't care about your
| opinion and here's why" I would respect him. Instead he
| just talks over the people he's pretending to listen to.
|
| His job should be to solicit feedback, not dictate it.
| And if he's going to dictate it I wish he would at least
| be upfront about it.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| I respect the candid comments from the Brave Dev. I wish
| all "PR departments" acted like this to be honest.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| For me it's random technical dumb stuff, like library version
| compatibility. Or a specific syntax I know exist but I can't
| figure out.
|
| Now when I don't find what I need, I double check with g! ...
| once every 2 or 3 times, google do find what I'm vaguely
| remember exist and is out there.
|
| Is never actual content, it's when I look for a specific one
| liner to copy paste and DDG do not deliver.
|
| I can live with that.
| basq wrote:
| In my experience, without use of g! DDG isn't serviceable.
| nh2 wrote:
| > Is 95% really not acceptable?
|
| No: When you use web search for professional work, such as
| searching for error messages or description of bugs of some
| software, any miss of somebod having encountered and solved
| them before can cost you days of work.
|
| From my experience, Google is currently still the best at
| finding those.
| brundolf wrote:
| I use DDG on personal devices and Google at work. I have a
| work-issued Google account, so privacy isn't really
| tractable for work stuff anyway
| mkl wrote:
| I think before you spend days of work on something DDG
| can't find, taking a few seconds to add !g and check
| Google's results would be sensible. Usually when I try
| that, though, Google isn't any better.
| bscphil wrote:
| > Is 95% really not acceptable?
|
| Moreover, is _any_ search engine really at 95% success rate?
| I certainly have never gotten that high with Google, even
| back in the days when Google Search was good. Nowadays it 's
| like 85% or so. About the same as DuckDuckGo for me. No
| matter which one I made my default, I'd have to check the
| other occasionally. (Incidentally, the same is true of
| satellite imagery. Sometimes Bing Maps is just much better
| for no obvious reason.)
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| It isn't acceptable, no. I tried Duck Search (aka Bing) for a
| couple weeks and in the beginning I wouldn't know that I
| wasn't getting the results I was looking for and eventually
| realized that the results just sucked compared to Google.
|
| I found myself having to second guess the results and then
| did a Duck / Google hybrid for a while, going to Google when
| I didn't get what I was looking for and eventually it was too
| much friction. I equate it with when I used to use two
| different text editors, one for speed (Sublime) and another
| (IntelliJ)for step-debugging because Sublime didn't have that
| part well implemented and it was just maddening to have to
| switch back and forth all the time and learn/maintain two
| sets of keyboard shortcuts etc.
| cfn wrote:
| I am on the third or forth trial to change to DDG and this
| time it is working not because DDG is better but because
| Google's search is degrading so much.
| GendingMachine wrote:
| Honestly the main reason I ended up abandoning DDG is because
| you can't see the publish date on search results.
|
| I know it's a fairly minor feature and one manipulated often
| by some websites, but I've still found it massively increases
| my chances of picking a relevant and up to date result. I
| didn't even realise how much I used it until I found myself
| getting extremely frustrated about its absence in DDG.
| mbauman wrote:
| > When I don't get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy.
| But the result are rarely any better
|
| This is exactly my experience. I have a "failed" search
| probably about a quarter of the time. Changing around the
| keywords can sometimes fix those failures... maybe about a
| quarter again are still stuck. So, yeah, ~5% failure rate. I
| inevitably try !g and am inevitably disappointed with
| effectively the same results (or lack thereof). Google
| successfully recovers a failed search maybe 10% of the time.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if that 5% is something DDG and others can
| realistically solve. Perhaps the issue has less to do with
| engineering and more to do with Google being the dominant
| player over the previous 20-years (give or take). That's an
| awfully long time for one company to effectively own a
| product category and build expectations among users about how
| it should work.
|
| FWIW I do get good results from DDG (sometimes better than
| Google) but that does require me to be a bit more thoughtful
| with my queries.
| dannyw wrote:
| While I think there's merits to what you are saying, also
| keep in mind that Google SERPs have dramatically changed
| over the past few years. It's very much a different search
| engine to Google of the 2010s.
|
| The most visible examples are that Google is editorialising
| specific results, and specifically boosting what it
| considers "credible sources". It also means wilfully not
| giving you what you want to search for.
|
| Try to search for "8kun" on Google, and you won't find a
| single link to 8kun.
|
| Try to search for "8kun" on Bing, and the #1 result is
| 8kun.top.
| mastazi wrote:
| > When I don't get the results I hoped I just use !g
|
| I use !sp instead, same results and no Google tracking
|
| (!sp searches on Startpage which in turn uses results from
| Google; according to both Privacy Badger and Brave Shields
| there are no trackers on SP)
| fowlie wrote:
| After using the duck for a couple of years, I have become
| better at two things:
|
| - Reading man pages or official documentation sites before
| opening a search engine
|
| - Thinking of more precise search keywords, as I got used to
| duck not helping me as much as google
| trts wrote:
| also: considering how far out in the long tail of search
| terms my query is, before choosing to go with the !g bang
| out of the gate.
|
| Google I find is still better for topics that are more
| idiosyncratic. But the bang syntax makes DDG a natural
| choice as default because many times I'll want to go
| directly to a specific domain search, e.g. !r or !nyt
| cturtle wrote:
| Along these lines I use ddg's bangs for the same benefit.
| So many searches for Python help are filled with very
| shallow intros on tutorial sites of varying quality with
| the official docs rarely the first result.
|
| Now I just prefix my query with !py and I'm immediately
| taken to the docs.
| r-w wrote:
| Brave Search supports !bangs ;)
| cturtle wrote:
| That's good to know!
|
| For clarity, I wasn't trying to say DDG is better than
| Brave, rather agreeing with the parent that there are
| smarter tools for gathering information rather than
| relying solely on a search engine.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Indeed, including nearly all of DDG's !bangs :) We also
| add in some others, such as !so for StackOverflow, !gh
| for GitHub, and !mdn for the Mozilla Developer Network.
| striking wrote:
| Those are also in DDG.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me; DDG has an impressive list of
| !bangs (more than 13K, IIRC). Thanks for the
| clarification!
| 0x49d1 wrote:
| And is there any list of all available bangs + also do we
| have an ability to add new ones?
| andreasha wrote:
| Tip it lacks keyboard shortcuts to navigate search
| results (up/down, enter).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results.
| It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I
| can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite).
|
| The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so
| consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason
| G's results are so good is because they add little bits of
| context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean that
| DDG's results can't be as good as G's, it just means you need
| to add that context yourself. Like if you search for a coding
| problem, add your computer language name to the search query.
| Or if you're search for a restaurant, add in your home town
| too.
|
| I've found DDG's results to be comparable to Google's and in
| fact in the last ~3 years of exclusively using DDG, I can count
| on one hand the number of times I've tried searching for
| something in Google after a failed search in DDG.
|
| Image searching is a little more hit and miss though. G's image
| search is better -- generally speaking. However DDG doesn't
| include Pinterest spam. So if you're after something specific
| using image searching, Google is better. But if you're after a
| general list of usable images, then DDG is better.
| abanayev wrote:
| This exhibits the halting problem, no?
|
| I tried to use DDG, but now I don't because I never knew
| whether it was just my DDG search that had been unsuccessful
| or whether there were truly no results.
|
| In fact, I wouldn't know with any search engine whether there
| are "truly no results", so I use G because I prefer to get
| what's widely accepted to be the closest results possible.
| mackrevinack wrote:
| DDG also makes it very to download images, unlike Google that
| now makes you go though to whatever site and have to scroll
| around in the page to find the image
| extropy wrote:
| Google was forced to do that because sites where screaming
| google is stealing their traffic by linking directly to
| images.
|
| Once DDG is big enough, they will be forced to do the same.
| losvedir wrote:
| Or as people like to say about Uber, DDG is doing "legal
| arbitrage" since they're still small and Google can't do
| that anymore.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The best thing about Google is that if you're on a website -
| say a travel website looking at hotels in Thailand - and then
| you Google "USD" it automatically completes "USD to Thai
| Baht" and then just gives you the answer very user friendly
| automatically. The same is true if you'd search "Best p" -
| you get "Best places to visit in Thailand" immediately, with
| a bunch of cards that are easy to read and use and get to
| more relevant things you're looking for.
|
| Sure - this invades your privacy. But it leads to good
| results and a better experience.
|
| You really don't want to give up your privacy in exchange for
| nothing. But this doesn't feel like the case here.
|
| It's also just as good for location things. If I'm in
| different neighborhoods - I can type one letter in - and
| Google will pop up the right restaurant - and then in one or
| two clicks I can make an order.
|
| This feels like a trade I can live with. I get it that a lot
| of people can't.
| marshray wrote:
| You're happy to give up your privacy just to save typing a
| few characters?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Considering that I use Google instead of DDG primarily
| because of how good the contextually aware results are
| for the things I most commonly search - sure.
| paraknight wrote:
| > but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is
| because they add little bits of context in through their
| profiling
|
| I disagree. I've tried to switch to DDG several times too,
| and always go back to StartPage, which is a proxy for Google,
| and the results were always better even without profiling.
| There is a case to be made for Google having better results
| globally from aggregate user behaviour though.
| nagarjun wrote:
| > Or if you're search for a restaurant, add in your home town
| too.
|
| This definitely doesn't help in India. If you live in the US,
| Brave/DDG can probably serve you better local results. It's
| abysmal in India. Google local results in India are orders of
| magnitude better here.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| > DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its
| results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume
| (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly
| cite).
|
| Per DDG's own help pages, they use mostly Bing and no Google.
| (The mixture of over 400 sources that they claim is used to
| provide the infobox-type results, which they call "Instant
| Answers", not the regular search results)
|
| > We also of course have more traditional links in the search
| results, which we also source from multiple partners, though
| most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
|
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
| bitL wrote:
| G's results are terrible for over 5 years and now they are
| reaching uselessness levels of Altavista.
|
| No G, I didn't want to search for what you suggested, really
| not.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| > "This new-fangled technology is worse than what we had
| back in my day!"
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I think googles crawler excels at crawling forums and social
| media like stack overflow or Reddit or support forums. The
| main thing I use google for is when I have a bug whose
| solution is 9 pages into some thread on some obscure
| discussion board I've never heard of
| truth_ wrote:
| > Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to
| replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo
|
| I have been using Startpage for a while. It's results are same
| as Google, but with zero tracking. But it puts (non-
| personalized) ads in results.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You can't have something be zero tracking and paid since they
| need to know if you have paid and so need to be able to track
| you.
|
| I use DDG for my main search, but there is the !g (i think)
| that you can prefix a search with to get it sent to google
| through DDG.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Tracking isn't a necessary component of a subscription
| service. You can have a model with premium features and/or
| offerings which doesn't harvest user data, such as searches
| and more.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I guess you could, but then I would have to depend on the
| service to hold up their promise not to track me. I don't
| want that.
| smsm42 wrote:
| If DDG works in 95% cases, just use it and use !google command
| on it when it misses the mark.
| mastazi wrote:
| or even better you can use !sp
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598042
| rataata_jr wrote:
| Startpage got sold
| mastazi wrote:
| I'm aware
| [deleted]
| axaxs wrote:
| Same excitement here. I'd love to see anyone(Brave or others)
| chip away at my Google dependencies, even if they charge me for
| them. I already love Brave as a browser, so here's hoping
| search pans out.
|
| I don't mind a company profiling me. A lot of Google's cross
| interacting products work great(Gmail to Calendar and Maps, for
| example). I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling
| my data. A guy can dream...
| judge2020 wrote:
| > I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my
| data.
|
| You can get pretty close to that by buying YT Premium [if you
| watch YouTube] and using an adblocker everywhere else, and
| this gives Google the non-ad-based monetary incentive to
| profile your viewing habits to show you more videos it thinks
| you'll like without optimizing for Ads.
| nl wrote:
| > I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my
| data.
|
| Google doesn't sell your data.
|
| They sell the opportunity for companies to place their ads
| based on Google's placement algorithms, which use your data.
|
| There is a big difference, and while I don't expect the
| general population makes the distinction I think on HN people
| should understand this.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I don't mind a company profiling me
|
| Not everyone has that luxury.
|
| > I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my
| data
|
| Then your data is worthless to them. _Nobody_ wants companies
| to abuse their personal data, that 's why it's such a
| lucrative business. Companies like Apple and Brave get away
| with it by edging out competition and instating their own
| standards (see: Brave's Ad "replacement"). It's all so
| ridiculously asinine that it makes me want to uninstall every
| piece of software from my computer and use it exclusively as
| a space heater for the rest of my life.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Brave isn't capturing user data, and the "replacement"
| topic requires more nuanced coverage. Internet users have
| been installing ad-and-content blockers long before Brave
| (when Netscape launched the Plugin API back in 1996 or so,
| ad-blockers began to appear almost immediately).
|
| Brave is rescuing the Web from a block-alone response,
| which starves content creators of much-needed support.
| Brave also increases the potential for support by giving
| users without disposable income (and those with disposable
| income) the ability to support those who make the Web
| enjoyable. We do this in a manner which is low-friction,
| and anonymous too (thanks to the Basic Attention Token).
|
| Brave has introduced a model that understands the security
| and privacy reasons for blocking third-party ads and
| trackers. But Brave doesn't stop there (as is the case with
| popular blockers); it also aims to address the issue of
| content sustainability online.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| You should read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=swMo1sK5ntk
| [deleted]
| axaxs wrote:
| > Then your data is worthless to them
|
| This is precisely the point. It should be worse than
| worthless, it should cost them money. And they should
| charge that to me, plus some nominal fee. I guess that's
| what I'm asking for.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The issue is that you're not describing a sustainable
| business model. Sure, it would be a much better situation
| than we have now, but you can't cover hosting fees with
| data bills.
| COGlory wrote:
| How much money does Google make again?
| xpe wrote:
| If there was a broadly enforced requirement to pay users
| for their data, businesses would adapt.
| Closi wrote:
| Uh oh, someone better tell Microsoft that charging
| businesses for Exchange isn't a sustainable business
| model.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| That's a strange argument. "If we pay you for the product
| you give us, we'll never be able to pay our service
| providers. Instead, we'll give sell it to someone else."
| slver wrote:
| > > I don't mind a company profiling me
|
| > Not everyone has that luxury.
|
| Defend that statement.
| devenvdev wrote:
| I wish they would add a feature that would let you add your own
| tags to counterweight the lack of tracking.
|
| Right now google knows a lot about you and uses it to refine
| the search results, if you remove tracking - quality drops. But
| if you at least let the user tell the engine that "I'm a
| programmer, gamer, geek, whatever" it might just do the trick
| to counterweight that.
| pythux wrote:
| Hey, we are planning on implementing something very similar
| to what you describe. You can read more about our proposal
| here: https://brave.com/goggles
|
| In a nutshell, community-curated lists of rules to deeply
| change the way our core ranking algorithm surface content and
| influence the results you see for a given query.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Fyi. In Firefox you prefix your search with the engine you want
| to use. That is, DDG can be your start and you can conveniently
| use Google as needed.
| smoldesu wrote:
| DuckDuckGo does the exact same thing with shebangs. Brave's
| implementation is just less granular.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Brave Search supports the _Fallback Mixing_ option, as well
| as shebangs (e.g. !g, !a, !b, !d, !e, !yt).
| xpe wrote:
| They are called bangs, not shebangs. A shebang is #!
|
| > In computing, a shebang is the character sequence
| consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation
| mark (#!) at the beginning of a script. It is also called
| sha-bang,[1][2] hashbang,[3][4] pound-bang,[5][6] or hash-
| pling.[7] - Wikipedia
|
| > Bangs are shortcuts that quickly take you to search
| results on other sites. For example, when you know you want
| to search on another site like Wikipedia or Amazon, our
| bangs get you there fastest. A search for !w filter bubble
| will take you directly to Wikipedia. -DDG
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Thank you for the correction. I used to call them hash-
| bangs (not sure where I picked up that habit in my ~25
| years of industry experience), until I started seeing
| more people refer to them as _shebangs_. Oddly enough,
| while reading them out I would always say "bang,
| <identifier>". I'll try to refer to them simply as
| _bangs_ (or perhaps something like _search /filter
| bangs_) from now on
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Because '#!' is a hash followed by a bang.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Quite obvious, but naming things is funny in the web-
| development world. We still call any asynchronous
| retrieval of data "AJAX," even though it rarely, if ever,
| involves XML :-)
| tills13 wrote:
| > Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-
| party results
|
| Why are we OK with these free services literally stealing
| Google results? Could you imagine the backlash if it was
| discovered that Google was doing the same for its results by
| stealing from DDG or another, smaller player?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Google is a Search Engine. Further, it displays content from
| sites directly in its results. This includes recipes, show
| times, sporting event details, and more. It has been argued
| that Google is stealing this data from smaller sites. Brave
| is (optionally, if you enable the feature) merely using
| Google (a more mature apparatus) as a means of learning to
| deliver better results to the user. The only way somebody is
| going to "build a better Google" is by training their data on
| what makes Google so popular to begin with. Brave is able to
| do this is a secure and private manner.
| tills13 wrote:
| So Google taking data from sites and putting it on theirs
| is "stealing" but Brave doing that is different and Brave
| taking results from Google is considered "learning" or
| "training"? Hmm... I'm beginning to think people just hate
| Google because it's "cool" to have a negative opinion about
| it here.
| lopatin wrote:
| Just curious, why are you opposed to search ads? They are
| already targeted by your search query, so don't fundamentally
| rely on tracking data.
| toddmorey wrote:
| Honestly, ads clearly marked as ads and contained just to the
| results page would be fine.
|
| But in the race for better ad performance, they introduced
| tracking & retargeting & profile building while at the same
| time both minimizing the visual difference between ads &
| organic as well as nearly pushing organic of the first page.
| zzyzxd wrote:
| IMHO search ads are bad search results, and in 99% of time
| they are not something I would want to click. So they are
| doing nothing useful but only adding friction to my search
| experience. I am not against privacy friendly ads in free
| services, but if there's an option to pay to get rid of ads,
| I will pay.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'm in eCommerce, run ads (on eBay, not Google) and would
| have to agree 100%.
|
| The only products we put paid promotion on are common and
| overpriced, and the demographic of the customers is very
| different to what we'd find through our products sold
| through organic search.
|
| Based solely on anecdata through the messages we receive
| and the addresses we ship to, the people who click on ads
| are somewhat more likely to be lower-socio, much more
| likely to have low literacy skills, and a couple of orders
| of magnitude more likely (not an exaggeration) to live in a
| remote Aboriginal community.
|
| It feels somewhat dirty/exploitative, but it's what the
| customer wants. They have the choice of saving $50+ by
| scrolling past the first 3-4 results, but they choose not
| to. I just don't understand.
| spullara wrote:
| Since the brave search results are so thin, maybe put them on
| the right to be less confusing.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I can't answer him, but there is a peace of mind not having
| ads talk (is not the right word) to you, even absent
| everything else. As in I can actually set my attention to
| something and finish a coherent whole without having to give
| any attention to ads.
|
| I didn't realize this until I installed Sponsorblock which
| got rid of the last ads I was seeing there. Suddenly I could
| focus on whatever they were creating and the video was
| talking about without having my attention diverted to
| something else.
|
| Maybe that is just me, but that is why I now mind ads.
| travoc wrote:
| Search ads have become visually almost indistinguishable from
| legitimate search results on most search engines, including
| DuckDuckGo. That's why I try to avoid them whenever possible.
| DuckDuckGo allows you to turn them off completely.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Since they're nearly indistinguishable from real organic
| search results, people click on them assuming the search
| engine found them the best result. This leads to two major
| problems:
|
| 1. Search ads are the primary source of malware and fraud on
| the Internet today. (Phishing emails are second.) Sites
| pretend to be other sites all the time, and to allow tracking
| and landing page behaviors, every major search ad provider
| allows ads to "lie" about the destination domain. So you may
| see an Amazon ad, it says it goes to Amazon.com, but actually
| directs through to realamazonlinkipromise.biz instead.
| Fraud's really profitable, so fraudsters win ad slots easily,
| and are adtech companies' best customers, so there's really
| little incentive to crack down on this.
|
| 2. Search ads use this placement as a form of extortion. If
| you run, say, Best Buy, you shouldn't have to buy search ads
| for "best buy", because obviously you're the best result.
| However, they have to, because if they don't, the search
| engine will sell ads to their competitors using their
| keyword, so people searching "best buy" get "Circuit City" as
| the top result instead. (Yes, I chose that reference in part
| because I don't want to shame any real current companies in
| this example for sleezy practices.) And since users click the
| top result (the ad), not the first organic result, Best Buy
| ends up paying for every click for every user who goes
| through Google/Bing/etc. to get to Best Buy.
|
| The second reason is why browsers are so obsessed with
| combining the search and address bars: They want you to
| search "best buy" or "bestbuy" or etc. because that's ad
| revenue, whereas actually typing bestbuy.com nets Google
| nothing.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Google only charges users once per user per click.
| dheera wrote:
| > every major search ad provider allows ads to "lie" about
| the destination domain.
|
| This seems like the real problem, not search ads as a
| concept
|
| > So you may see an Amazon ad, it says it goes to
| Amazon.com, but actually directs through to
| realamazonlinkipromise.biz
|
| Just disallow that? Problem solved.
|
| If you want yet another filter, only allow public companies
| or companies that have raised >10M on Crunchbase to
| advertise, and have them verify that they are really who
| they are by asking them to put some string of your choosing
| in their DNS records.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > Just disallow that?
|
| Sure, Google could disclose real advertisement
| destination URLs tomorrow if they wanted. But the
| marketers are their customers, and that would upset their
| customers quite a bit. Especially since a lot of their
| customers' entire purpose in paying for Google Ads is to
| exploit that particular feature.
| losvedir wrote:
| > _2. Search ads use this placement as a form of extortion.
| If you run, say, Best Buy, you shouldn 't have to buy
| search ads for "best buy", because obviously you're the
| best result. However, they have to, because if they don't,
| the search engine will sell ads to their competitors using
| their keyword, so people searching "best buy" get "Circuit
| City" as the top result instead. (Yes, I chose that
| reference in part because I don't want to shame any real
| current companies in this example for sleezy practices.)
| And since users click the top result (the ad), not the
| first organic result, Best Buy ends up paying for every
| click for every user who goes through Google/Bing/etc. to
| get to Best Buy._
|
| One thing to note is that the _cost_ of the ad is based on
| the landing page relevance (and even more so for branded
| terms), and so in your example Best Buy would be able to
| buy the ad for the "Best Buy" keyword for pennies (a
| rounding error on their SEM campaign, I'm sure), while
| Circuit City would have to pay a whole bunch for the "Best
| Buy" keyword.
|
| Given that, I don't mind it so much. It's a good way for a
| competitor to get their name out there, but it's not really
| a sustainable practice long term for them. There's built-in
| pressure favoring the incumbent on their own terms.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Bear in mind, Best Buy should pay zero pennies for each
| of the millions of people trying to reach their website.
| It's absolutely inexcusable for a search company, which
| also owns an ad company, and also happens to run the web
| browser everyone's using, to create a system that
| basically taxes all attempts to visit a business's
| website specifically.
|
| Honestly, what Google and Microsoft and such are doing in
| this case is _trademark theft_. They are selling the
| search result for a trademarked name they don 't own, and
| when the actual trademark owner wants to be found by
| their own name... they have to pay for it.
|
| I don't know who is going to file the case, but sooner or
| later, someone should, because it's a slam dunk.
| [deleted]
| slver wrote:
| > I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with
| DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up
| changing the default search engine back to Google.
|
| Hmm...
|
| > Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first
| of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously
| check our search results against third-party results, and mix
| them on the results page.
|
| That's also what DDG does. If you don't like DDG, odds you'll
| like some even smaller effort are quite to zero.
| octatrack wrote:
| I switched to using StartPage after DDG failed me. I ended up
| adding !g to almost all of the searches.
|
| StartPage shows Google results through a proxy for improved
| privacy. I am quite happy with it.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Just a note that StartPage was bought by a not-too-privacy
| friendly company.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Startpage was turned into shit over the last few months.
| Requiring JS for search and absolutely freakish amount of
| ads dominating the first scroll of results.
|
| Been with them for about a decade but this is too much
| Dah00n wrote:
| > Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first
| of its kind.
|
| That's... an interesting way to put it. I can't really twist
| and turn it into the truth though. Smells like it was put
| through a lot of PR.
|
| >However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our
| search results against third-party results, and mix them on the
| results page.
|
| This is something almost all of the search engines outside
| Google and Bing does. DDG does this with Bing for example.
|
| As far as I can tell the only "new" in this will be that the
| same thing is done again by another company.
| eloisius wrote:
| I've stuck with DDG for about the past year and a half and I
| have to agree. I want it to be good, but when debugging some
| obscure problem (like trying to learn SwiftUI lately) Google is
| able to dig up more result. Of course the "there were not
| results for <your error message> so displaying results for
| 'computer programming instead'" is frustrating so I preemtively
| add quotes around every term more frequently.
|
| Lately I've noticed a weird problem with DDG where it will load
| a blank page of results. The page header with logo and search
| bar is there, but the white part of the page that has results
| never loads. Even after refreshing multiple times it's the
| same, but trying a different query fixes it.
|
| If Brave can manage to produce higher quality results while
| weeding out SEO spam I will definitely subscribe.
| firexcy wrote:
| > a weird problem with DDG where it will load a blank page of
| results
|
| I've noticed the same problem too. My guess is that DDG pulls
| search results from 3rd-party engines such as Bing and for
| some technical issues it may fail from time to time.
| kristopolous wrote:
| DDG almost fails in the same way as goog.
|
| The only advantage I have seen in results is Google has removed
| nonsense and conspiracy garbage from their results.
|
| It's the general rush towards infantilism. I want to see the
| kind of nonsense that has assuaged so many people into
| effective insanity and apparently Google has decided that I'm
| not enough of an adult to view it.
|
| It's like their Android dictionary. It lacks lots of words that
| I have to go and check manually because they've decided that
| someone using a nuanced word is only done in error
|
| Or with their search where they remove all the important stuff
| from the query and return the results that I was specifically
| trying to avoid with those important modifiers "there's not
| many results with x" - Yes! That's the point.
|
| All over the place they're just on some endless campaign to
| patronize the userbase. From the address bar that simply just
| refuses to do http: to a painfully dumb search in Gmail, it's
| really a company wide systemic problem they need to address.
|
| At least back in the say AOL days, which were renown for this
| kind of mentality, they kept things at a stable sophistication
| for the lifetime of the product. It wasn't in some unending
| rush to become ever more stupid and childish with every
| subsequent release
| unicornporn wrote:
| > I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5%
| failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just
| couldn't stand.
|
| So, just use https://startpage.com/ and get proxied Google
| results. Searx is another alternative.
| mrpf1ster wrote:
| DuckDuckGo allows you to do a Google search by prepending "!g"
| to any query. So usually I do that for the last 5% of queries
| that DDG fails on.
| aazaa wrote:
| It redirects to Google. So the effect (including tracking) is
| identical to just doing a Google search.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| This is incorrect. _Fallback-Mixing_ , if you have enabled
| it (which requires Brave), issues an anonymous query to
| Google, lacking any cookies or other persistent state for
| that domain. These results are then presented along with
| Brave Search's own results. There's no tracking involved.
| If you perform a direct Google search, you're passing along
| your cookies as well.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The user was replying to using DDG with !g
|
| In an indirect way, it's possible by doing !sp on DDG,
| which redirects the search to startpage, which shows
| untracked google results.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Ah, my apologies for any confusion. For what it's worth,
| the !sp _bang_ is supported on Brave Search as well :)
| unicornporn wrote:
| Or you could just use https://startpage.com/ and get Google
| quality results 100% of the time.
| mackrevinack wrote:
| that's also 100% reliant on google though. what would
| happen if that became a lot more popular than it is now?
| would google try to sabotage it in any way?
|
| i would rather support and spread the word about search
| engines that don't rely solely on google
| mastazi wrote:
| As I said in my other comment[1], you might be interested in
| using !sp which gives you the same results without Google
| tracking
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598042
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| This is silly. 95% of what one can track on the front end
| can be done on the back end. If you hit Google's servers,
| you're being tracked. Period.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Startpage is owned by an adtech company now.
| mastazi wrote:
| that doesn't change the fact that there are no trackers
| and the fact that it uses Google results
| Dah00n wrote:
| No, but it does mean that you are likely to use it
| without knowing when they do start tracking you. Because
| of course an adtech company will (and of course they will
| deny until the day they change it).
| mastazi wrote:
| > Because of course an adtech company will
|
| then it seems they're being quite slow, since the
| acquisition happened almost 2 years ago.
| zzyzxd wrote:
| The frustration I am talking about is:
|
| Check query result -> realize the result is bad -> scroll
| back to the search bar -> place cursor at the beginning of
| the query -> enter "!g" -> redirect to Google.com
|
| It is not too bad on desktop, but doing it once on a
| smartphone is more than enough to push me to switch back to
| Google.
| windowojji wrote:
| I'm amazed that DDG/Brave don't understand that typing
| something immediately after a "!" on a smartphone is
| annoying and difficult. DDG only supports "!" after the
| character for a small subset of bangs. Thankfully "g!" is
| one of them, but it's immensely easier to type on
| smartphone.
| the-pigeon wrote:
| Personally I find it pretty predictable which queries duck
| duck go will fail on. Basically very niche ones.
|
| So I just prepend based on what I'm searching for to begin
| with instead of after a failure. But I've also been using
| duckduckgo as my default for over a decade so I've gotten
| used to it.
| amoshi wrote:
| The !g can be almost anywhere in the query, it just can't
| be followed by non-whitespace or prefixed by special signs.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is what I wanted to say. It's a life saver on mobile
| especially. Just append !g to the query (or !gi for
| google images, !gm for maps, etc)
| gnull wrote:
| If you use Tridactyl, you can quickly jump to the search
| bar with "gi". That's what I do.
| tonyspiff wrote:
| you can easily create a command for it (and bind to
| key(s)): command ddgGoogleBang composite
| js (new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)).get('q')
| + ' !g' | urlmodify_js -q q | open
| smithza wrote:
| most browsers support <c-l> to hop the cursor to the url
| bar for searches or url entries
| fictorial wrote:
| / <c-e> !g <enter>
| jonathansampson wrote:
| You can use !g on Brave Search too, or turn on _Fallback
| Mixing_ in Brave Search Settings, which will anonymously call
| out to Google and pull in results as needed. This helps to
| train the nascent engine more rapidly. I hope this helps!
| Siira wrote:
| Is scraping Google for your own commercial search engine
| legal?
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| Is that legal?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be? Google scrapes the web to populate
| it's results, why wouldn't other search engines scrape
| the web as well? Google is a website.
| SamBam wrote:
| It's not scraping static text in order to point you to
| those sites, it's using the features of the site to
| perform a service better than you can do yourself. It's
| completely different.
|
| If I made a site that claimed to help you with your math
| homework and simply sent the queries to WolframAlpha,
| that would also not just be "scraping."
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is basically what Google does to Wikipedia and
| rebrands as "Knowledge Graph".
| SamBam wrote:
| Google has donated many millions to the Wikimedia
| Foundation, basically in payment for this.
|
| (But, again, there's a difference between scraping and
| echoing a request on another site and waiting for its
| response. The latter is basically unauthorized use of its
| API, not scraping.)
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It'll be very telling if Google switches to using
| Wikipedia Enterprise:
| https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-
| tec...
|
| My guess is Google's "donation" is pennies on the dollar
| from what they benefit from Wikipedia, and more of a
| token gesture than anything else.
| xpe wrote:
| This is naive. Web sites have various terms of service.
| therein wrote:
| Violating a website's ToS is hardly illegal, though.
| xpe wrote:
| > Violating a website's ToS is hardly illegal, though.
|
| Can you be more specific as to your claim? Not illegal in
| what sense(s)? And what is your basis for the claim?
|
| I'm not a lawyer, but saying "violating a website's ToS
| is hardly illegal" is fraught advice.
|
| While individuals may get some leeway when it comes to
| ToS violations (see [1] and [2]), I would expect
| companies scraping and/or extracting content would be
| treated differently.
|
| [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/07/court-
| violating-terms-...
|
| [2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/court-
| violating-...
|
| [3]: https://www.octoparse.com/blog/10-myths-about-web-
| scraping
|
| [4]: https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/12026106
| 87621/?s...
| Kiro wrote:
| The only way for it to be illegal is if they're breaking
| a law, but then it would be illegal regardless of what
| the ToS says.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Because Google's robots.txt disallows it, and those
| websites allow it.
| smsm42 wrote:
| robots.txt is not a legal contract. It's just a
| convention to express the wishes of the site author, but
| there's no legal obligation to follow these wishes.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| It does indicate that those other sites _want_ Google to
| scrape them, while Google does _not_ want others to
| scrape their results, which is an important distinction
| ocdtrekkie ignored for whether the scrapee will want to
| take legal action.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| You may wish to review
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-
| v-l...
|
| Google Search results are definitely "public data" so
| long as Google provides them to anyone who asks.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Then why does Startpage pay Google and DDG pay Microsoft?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| While scraping search results isn't illegal, by any
| means, it's also not illegal for Google or Microsoft to
| block requests they believe are from competing search
| engines. Presumably the cost of paying them is less than
| the cost of hiring engineers to constantly try to find
| new ways to outwit Google and Microsoft engineers.
|
| Again, if scraping data from websites without permission,
| Google simply wouldn't exist. Bear in mind, robots.txt is
| a feature that Google and Microsoft choose to respect,
| but the default assumption search engines have made from
| the beginning, is that they are free to grab whatever
| they want from the web, unless you ask them otherwise to
| please not.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > the default assumption search engines have made from
| the beginning, is that they are free to grab whatever
| they want from the web, unless you ask them otherwise to
| please not.
|
| Which Google's robots.txt does.
|
| > scraping search results isn't illegal, by any means
|
| While scraping the results for yourself to look at might
| be OK, scraping results to display verbatim in another
| search engine without permission stretches fair use.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > While scraping the results for yourself to look at
| might be OK, scraping results to display verbatim in
| another search engine without permission stretches fair
| use.
|
| No, it doesn't, because Google results aren't
| copyrightable, hence, there is no such thing as fair use.
| It's just information anyone is free to collect and use
| as they see fit.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Why would rankings not be copyrightable?
| mthoms wrote:
| It's just a redirect to Google.
| decrypt wrote:
| There seem to be two different features:
|
| 1. Redirection to Google.
|
| 2. Piping Google's results back to Brave Search's UI:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27594754
|
| The original commenter was asking about the latter.
| mthoms wrote:
| Ah, I see, Thanks for the heads up.
| decrypt wrote:
| I am not able to locate this setting. I am using Brave
| Search on Firefox. Is that available only on Brave Search
| on Brave browser?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Yes, the _Fallback Mixing_ requires the Brave browser,
| since it pipes the request through the participating user
| 's machine (only if the user has first opted-in to the
| feature).
| 55555 wrote:
| They will definitely implement ads. They're an advertising
| company.
| fossislife wrote:
| "options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search"
|
| https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Nice, I would pay for it. Would make it a lot easier if the
| backend was #opensource though. Not saying I won't but it
| would make it a no-brainer.
| deadite wrote:
| Future post: "We have listened to our users, and we are
| removing ad-free paid search due to a lack of demand and
| [some excuses about how it's technically difficult to
| maintain it]."
|
| We'll see which comes first. That post, or "Our Great
| Journey."
| mattlondon wrote:
| Do they anonymously check Google though? Maybe they'll just use
| bing like all the others
| gigamatt wrote:
| I've been working on this private search engine
| https://private.sh/ for a while. It encrypts your query using
| client-side javascript so only the Gigablast search engine can
| read your query. And your query is delivered to Gigablast through
| an anonymizing proxy that is not in Gigablast's control. So you
| get TOR-like privacy. Also Gigablast's privacy policy
| https://gigablast.com/privacy.html shows that your query is not
| transmitted to 3rd parties or used for anything other than to
| return your results. Gigablast also has 0 dependencies on Bing or
| Google.
| howolduis wrote:
| are u planning to add image search? also where is the source
| code?
| gigamatt wrote:
| the source code for gigablast is on github. yes, gigablast
| has image search but private.sh needs to start using it soon.
| [deleted]
| aarnushrithkha wrote:
| Im using private.sh but what is the proof that it does'nt have
| any logs and it isn't open source. And please add a anonymous
| view like startpage and make it open source.
| gigamatt wrote:
| The encryption code is open source as it is in the javascript
| so you can evaluate it. It's also available in the chrome
| plug-in, and there's now the app in the android play store: h
| ttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privatesh...
| . so the private.sh web server or related anonymyzing proxy
| don't have access to your query since it is encrypted. on the
| gigablast servers will know your query, but they won't know
| your IP address.
| [deleted]
| timvisee wrote:
| Why does this footer hide after the first page view?
|
| > Brave Search uses private usage metrics to estimate overall
| activity and performance. You can turn off this option in
| Settings.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Keeping the UI clean. A section and toggle exists for the
| feature immediately within the
| https://search.brave.com/settings page too.
| mderazon wrote:
| DDG search is fine for me, the thing I think Google still does
| better is all the searches like "what's the weather in X", "3.5
| miles to km", "what's the next NBA game" etc
|
| I found that Google still does these things much better.
| ernesth wrote:
| Google has taught people to ask full questions (without
| question marks strangely), and knows how to treat those
| requests (Who is the mayor of Palo Alto; What's the weather in
| X"...). DDG is a little worse at that.
|
| I expect search engines to search for every words in my
| request, and I prefer shorter requests. DDG gives pertinent
| instant answers for "weather Paris", "3.5mi in km" and correct
| results for NBA schedule.
| [deleted]
| kaladin_1 wrote:
| Oh wow! Goood news!
|
| I normally use Chrome and Google search for work and Firefox and
| DDG for personal things. Then, Brave for personal browsing that
| requires a vpn or Chromium support. Some websites are just
| optimised for Chrome, Brave always come in handy in that case.
| claytongulick wrote:
| I think the thing that excites me the most about this, is the
| non-personalized search results.
|
| Ironically, I end up using DDG for _more_ accuracy, because a lot
| of the time on Google I am unable to get to articles or
| information I 'm looking for, no matter how I search.
|
| I think this is a result of personalized search results - i.e.
| Google "guessing" based on ML models what my interests are. Many
| times I don't want this, I just want to see pages that use the
| more classic PageRank algorithm.
|
| Honestly, sometimes when I search it feels like Google is
| "preaching" to me in a way - rather than showing me what I search
| for, it shows me what it thinks I ought to be viewing. I don't
| get this from DDG, it feels like the results there are a lot more
| objective?
| blackcat201 wrote:
| If Brave is just another ad company (quote in their blog post)
| how is this different than Google?
| esjeon wrote:
| AFAICT, Brave has been pushing "privacy-respecting ads", which
| likely are less profitable and less effective than targeted
| ads.
| Draken93 wrote:
| Exciting news! Hopefully thats the first no tracking search
| engine that meets my requirements.
|
| It seems as Brave Search could be the first non-tracking search
| engine that combines satisfying search results with good
| presentation.
|
| I was never completly happy with DuckDuckGo, probably they
| use(despite others) search results of Bing. DuckDuck together
| with Startpage(google results but bad presentation) works for me
| but is unconvinient.
| joemccall86 wrote:
| Not sure if it's the hug of death, but this search generates a
| 500: https://search.brave.com/search?q=Spring+Boot
| reed1234 wrote:
| Weird- spring+boots doesn't
| pythux wrote:
| Fixed now! Not a hug of death (yet).
| bsclifton wrote:
| Thanks for the report! :) Fix coming
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| I'd really like to be able to customise (explicitly not based on
| my "behaviour"), how I want my search results ranked. I don't
| really care how you do it, let me upvote/downvote results, or let
| me build rules, but consider the default results just a starting
| point and then overlay the users preferred index
| pythux wrote:
| We are actually planning to implement just that! You can read
| more about our proposal here: https://brave.com/goggles/
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| damn, I can't believe how quickly you wrote that after my
| comment! :D
| siproprio wrote:
| Why do they use > instead of /?
|
| It's Horrible.
|
| They also do not indicate when the result is a .pdf or a
| document.
|
| The best feature that google killed was advanced filtering. If
| instead of privacy brave gave me that, I'll sell my soul in a
| heartbeat!
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| There's only 1 page of search results, regardless of the search
| term. Why?
| pythux wrote:
| Not to be nitpicking, but we actually show up to 20 results
| (not counting infobox, videos, news, places, instance answer,
| etc.) in a single page, which would correspond to 2 pages of
| other search engines (they usually show up to 10 results per
| page).
|
| The idea is that most people will never go beyond first or
| (very rarely) second page. And as said in another comment, if
| you did not find what you were looking for in the top 20
| results, changes are you will not find it in following results.
|
| We do have plans for a feature which would allow community-
| based alterations of our core ranking algorithm which might
| help here. You can read about it here:
| https://brave.com/goggles/
|
| Disclaimer: I work on Brave Search.
| fiala__ wrote:
| this is to do with the philosophy of Cliqz (who developed
| what's now Brave Search) - if you can't find the results on the
| first page, you'll probably be better off changing the search
| term than paginating. I have no idea how reasonable that is
| though.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Search the word "porn". 20 results? The results I want might
| be on the 2nd page or further.
|
| I'm willing to concede maybe I'm an outlier in behavior but I
| definitely want more than 20 results perhaps 33% of my
| searches.
|
| I wonder if cliqz did any studies on this before deciding on
| 20 fixed results.
|
| It also conveniently allows them to avoid the issue of paging
| search results.
| codesternews wrote:
| "Why not Shown HN" :P
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| this Brave logo is so close to ING Direct Bank's (look at their
| ios app), it's ridiculous. Once they discover you I reckon
| they'll get legal action to change it.
| beprogrammed wrote:
| Ooh interesting. Ever since runaroo gave up the go, I've needed
| something new.
| 6510 wrote:
| community-curated open ranking models https://brave.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf
|
| Wonderful stuff, best hill to die on.
| twiddlebits wrote:
| This is just bing reranked with occasional results thrown in
| perhaps from their own index. Just look at the query completion
| suggestions, they are identical to Bing. If they had their own
| index they'd have a link to the cached copy.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Seems quite fast, good UX overall. I like that it gives me
| information like "all results from Brave" so that if they do fall
| back I know about it.
|
| DDG has a 'bang syntax' where I can do things like '!rust' to
| start searching the rust docs from my url - I like that a lot, I
| wonder if there's anything similar here or if I could work around
| that somehow.
| schmorptron wrote:
| They already do, at least partially. Adding !g to the end of a
| search redirects to google.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Update: We do support !rust as well (and all of DDG's other
| _bangs_ ).
|
| Brave Search supports many _shebangs_ , but I don't believe
| we've added support for `!rust` yet (we do have `!mdn` and
| `!so` though). I'll submit a request to add a `!rust` option
| too!
| staticassertion wrote:
| Very cool - good to know.
| cocoafleck wrote:
| You don't seem to support the !ddg, and !duckduckgo bangs.
| See https://search.brave.com/search?q=!ddg+test nor do you
| support bangs in the middle of queries such as
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=example+!rust+example
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Update: We do support !rust as well (and all of DDG's other
| bangs).
|
| damn, alright, you got me. I'll try it out as default for a
| while
| rhizome wrote:
| "Shebangs" have been defined as '#!' for decades, I'd suggest
| they not be redefined.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Shebang specifically refers to using an exclamation point
| to define where data should be directed. Same as it is in
| Bash scripts, just a different context and slightly
| different syntax.
| morelisp wrote:
| The "she" is specifically a phonetic clipping of the "#",
| otherwise it's just a bang - but oh well, even jargon
| doesn't mean shit anymore.
| detaro wrote:
| DDG generally calls them "bangs":
| https://duckduckgo.com/bang
| surround wrote:
| > In computing, a shebang is the character sequence
| consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation
| mark (#!) at the beginning of a script.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)
|
| The word "shebang" has different uses outside of
| computing, but I can't find any use of the word that
| refers to a ! _without_ a #
| x4e wrote:
| Note the (Unix) part of the Wikipedia URL. This is an
| entirely different context.
| surround wrote:
| So in which context does "shebang" refer to a ! without a
| # ? I can't find any definition like that online.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Here I had assumed it was a Ricky Martin reference.
| mediocre-one wrote:
| Off topic, a link description from my first search page renders a
| bit different.
|
| ``` Jan 12, 2021 - var ytplayer = ytplayer || ...tps:\/\/s.youtub
| e.com\/api\/stats\/atr?docid=7EqnoEljHCw\&ei=aL-
| MX5nwOfjOzLUPxLWJiAw\&len=206\&ns=yt\&plid=AAWx-WOvfFqbWF59\&ver=
| 2\",\"elapsedMediaTimeSeconds\":5}},\"videoDetails\":{\"videoId\"
| :\"7EqnoEljHCw\",\"title\":\"** ... ```
| nr2x wrote:
| At least they are trying to build an actual index instead of
| rebranding Bing like duck duck.
| Nicksil wrote:
| Bing is one of many sources from which duckduckgo derives its
| results; kind of like what's going on here with Brave's new
| search.
| corobo wrote:
| Do side by side comparisons. I haven't seen any of my
| searches (admittedly only the few I checked for this) differ
| from Bing's results in results or result positioning
|
| It's unfortunate really as the owner guy keeps saying they
| use multiple sources but in all of my tests.. they're all
| Bing. I don't care about using Bing, I do care about being
| deceived (slippery slope, thin end of the wedge, etc etc)
| bilkow wrote:
| Interesting, in my tests (posted at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598329), the results
| differ a lot.
|
| Maybe its more about localization, I'm curious to see the
| same example from someone in the US, but there are two
| links which do not seem to be in Bing's results at all,
| making me believe it has been taken from somewhere else.
| corobo wrote:
| It could very well be location. I'm in the UK for
| reference
| mda wrote:
| Do a few more tests, especially complex queries, you will
| see a pattern emerges. In my tests, It is definitely
| using the Bing index (not necessarily same ranking /
| filtering algorithms or the same version of the index)
| lawl wrote:
| Not true. In practice I've found their results to be
| basically identical to bing and other bing front-ends. What's
| not from bing are the widgets like weather, or dictionary
| definitions etc.
|
| So imo, "many sources, bing is just one" is misleading, as
| the main SERPs are pretty much straight up bing.
|
| (Note: I've used ddg as my main search engine for years)
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Not true.
|
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
|
| >In practice I've found their results to be basically
| identical to bing and other bing front-ends.
|
| This is anecdote. Countering my argument -- calling it
| misleading -- with anecdote doesn't work.
| [deleted]
| lawl wrote:
| They pretty clearly only talk about instant answers
| there.
|
| When they say over 400 sources it _even links_ to [0] a
| page about instant answers.
|
| What do you expect? That I hack into ddg and give you
| their source? Try some searches for yourself and see that
| the results [1] are basically identical to bing [2] and
| other engines using bing[3], when compared to different
| indicies[4][5][6].
|
| [0] https://duck.co/ia
|
| [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monkey
|
| [2] https://www.bing.com/search?q=monkey
|
| [3] https://www.qwant.com/?q=monkey
|
| [4] https://www.google.com/search?q=monkey
|
| [5] https://search.brave.com/search?q=monkey
|
| [6] https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=monkey
| Nicksil wrote:
| >They pretty clearly only talk about instant answers
| there.
|
| You seem to be dismissing instant answers when in-fact
| those are exactly what the end-user expects; that's
| search results: Type in a query, get an answer. What am I
| missing here?
| lawl wrote:
| > You seem to be dismissing instant answers when in-fact
| those are exactly what the end-user expects; that's
| search results: Type in a query, get an answer. What am I
| missing here?
|
| No, I didn't, and in my first post I also said they
| aren't from bing:
|
| > What's not from bing are the widgets like weather, or
| dictionary definitions etc
|
| I also said that I've used ddg for years. Presumably that
| had a reason?
|
| I said the main results are pretty much straight bing,
| and have now backed it up, about as well as you can
| reasonably expect me to. That's all there's to it. Please
| don't interpret more into what I wrote, than what I
| actually wrote.
| Nicksil wrote:
| I stated
|
| >Bing is one of many sources from which duckduckgo
| derives its results
|
| You stated
|
| >Not true.
|
| I then backed-up my statement with a source.
|
| You still haven't made clear what part of my statement
| was not true.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Obviously they're saying (correctly) that the part that
| isn't true is the part where you said the search results
| aren't directly from bing. And by search results they
| clearly mean the list of links wherein you click on a
| link and go to a webpage that matches your query.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Obviously they're saying(correctly) that the part that
| isn't true is the part where you said the search results
| aren't directly from bing.
|
| This makes no sense. What I said is still there. I said
| that Bing is one source used to derive the results DDG
| returns.
| bscphil wrote:
| > I said that Bing is one source used to derive the
| results DDG returns.
|
| No, you said it was one _of many_. Implying that there
| are other sources that users are likely to actually
| encounter in practice feeding the search results page.
| That 's what your repliers are saying is untrue.
| bilkow wrote:
| > They pretty clearly only talk about instant answers
| there.
|
| They talk about both, "traditional links" are not instant
| answers: "We also of course have more traditional links
| in the search results, which we also source from multiple
| partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from
| Google)."
|
| > Try some searches for yourself and see that the results
| are basically identical to bing
|
| I disagree on your definition of "basically identical".
| Google and Bing results (in a private window) are more
| similar to me than DDG and Google:
|
| Bing:
|
| 1. https://www.monkey.exchange
|
| 2. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cool.mon
| key.an...
|
| 3. https://www.monkey.cool
|
| 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey
|
| 5. https://pt.surveymonkey.com/
|
| (change page)
|
| 6. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cool.mon
| key.an...
|
| 7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0hyYWKXF0Q (TONES AND
| I - DANCE MONKEY (OFFICIAL VIDEO))
|
| 8. https://www.britannica.com/animal/monkey
|
| 9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(TV_series)
|
| 10. https://www.monkey.vision/
|
| DDG:
|
| 1. https://www.monkey.cool
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey
|
| 3. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cool.mon
| key.an...
|
| 4. https://www.britannica.com/animal/monkey
|
| 5. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monkey
|
| 6. 2pchat.monkey.cool
|
| 7. https://www.livescience.com/27944-monkeys.html
|
| 8. https://a-z-animals.com/animals/monkey/
|
| 9. https://www.monkeyworlds.com/
|
| 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTrnSJLXGBg (Mokey's
| Show - Is Not Christmas - YouTube)
|
| Google (after changing to english bc they don't respect
| browser prefs...):
|
| 1. https://www.monkey.exchange
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey
|
| (Videos links)
|
| 3. https://www.motociclismoonline.com.br/noticias/honda-
| monkey-... ("localized" news bc I can't get rid of it)
|
| 4. https://www.linkedin.com/company/monkeyexchange
|
| 5. https://motor1.uol.com.br/news/515705/honda-
| monkey-125-2022-... (also localized)
|
| 6. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cool.mon
| key.an...
|
| 7. https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-
| monkey
|
| 8. https://www.britannica.com/animal/monkey
|
| 9. https://www.surveymonkey.com/user/sign-up/
|
| 10. https://www.surveymonkey.com/
|
| DDG has more "monkey" definitions than both Google and
| Bing, all have Wikipedia, all have cool.monkey (in
| different ways), Bing + Google have monkey.exchange and
| surveymonkey, the video's the same on Google and Bing,
| all of them have some unique links (such as monkey.vision
| and monkeyworlds.com)
|
| Also two of the results ("Mokey's Show" youtube video and
| 2pchat.monkey.cool) are not on the first 10 pages of
| Bing's results, if at all.
|
| (Edit: formatting and the two results)
| Dah00n wrote:
| They are using Cliqz Tailcat and Bing.
| tisthetruth wrote:
| Does anyone use StartPage? Is it truly privacy friendly?
| allyourhorses wrote:
| Based on the principles in the blog post alone (
| https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ ), this will obviously be my
| new default search until it's proven sufficiently unusable.
|
| DDG's usability has always been a bit of a problem for me, it
| feels more like a perl wrapper over some search bookmarks than an
| engine in its own right. Will give this one a go for a while,
| there is literally every reason to try and few reasons not to.
|
| edit: holy crap Brave, c'mon, 13 CSS files and 15 JS files for
| the search result page? Cold cache case absolutely matters when
| you're trying to grow, sort it out!
| onli wrote:
| I used brave search over the last week or so. It worked well
| for me, with less failed searches than on DDG, which sadly
| often does not work for me for more local queries. It did not
| feel unusable at all.
|
| Note that I already liked cliqz before (properly evaluating how
| good a search engine is is hard, so that might have introduced
| bias).
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I going to try it, too, but I'm concerned that I only get 1
| page of search results regardless of the search term. Weird.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| People rarely venture beyond the first page of results. That
| being said, we've filed an issue to consider adding
| additional pages of results too. Thank you for the feedback!
| allyourhorses wrote:
| > Fully private. No profiles.
|
| > Brave Search doesn't track you or your queries. Ever. It's
| impossible for us to share, sell, or lose your data, because we
| don't collect it in the first place
|
| So eh, Brave's search is actually running through Amazon
| CloudFront load balancers. This wasn't quite my first idea of
| privacy. At the very least, it means searches are likely being
| logged at least once, and stored using some policies set by
| Amazon, not Brave
|
| Some pretty curious internal API here:
| https://search.brave.com/api/state/independence , found in the
| copious amounts of duplicate JS on the page
| jonathansampson wrote:
| That JSON endpoint for Independence metrics is what feeds the
| Independence Score on Brave Search. Click on the to view your
| own score (provided you have performed a sufficient number of
| searches). Current global score is 87% at the time of this
| writing. More information at
| https://search.brave.com/help/independence.
| [deleted]
| gbmatt wrote:
| I've been working on this private search engine
| https://private.sh/ for a while. It encrypts your query using
| client-side javascript so only the Gigablast search engine can
| read your query. And your query is delivered to Gigablast through
| an anonymizing proxy that is not in Gigablast's control. So you
| get TOR-like privacy. Also Gigablast's privacy policy
| https://gigablast.com/privacy.html shows that your query is not
| transmitted to 3rd parties or used for anything other than to
| return your results. Gigablast also has 0 dependencies on Bing or
| Google.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Reminder that Brave has done some morally questionable things in
| the past:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
|
| They've since corrected both of those things, but those are
| enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I'm concerned about what happens to data Brave collects when
| Brave decides to sell itself. At some point they could be
| attractive to acquire.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Brave doesn't collect user data. We believe in _Can 't be
| Evil_ over _Don 't be Evil_.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| To be clear, I only mentioned 'data' generically and not
| 'user data' specifically. Its clear that Brave Ads collects
| data, even if _you_ don 't consider that data to be _user
| data_.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Correct. Data is collected. We detail that data and the
| privacy-preserving process by which it is collected at
| https://www.brave.com/p3a/. When you consider the type of
| data collected, it's clear why Brave is still identified
| as the "most private" browser among leading options: http
| s://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.
| Everything we do is designed for user-privacy and
| security, first and foremost. No amount of data is worth
| breaking your trust.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Define 'user data'.
| kup0 wrote:
| Repeating this bumper sticker mantra is honestly
| consistently unhelpful and comes off smug, IMHO
| AegirLeet wrote:
| It's a browser with built-in cryptocurrency nonsense. That
| should tell you everything you need to know.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Yep. The fact that it even existed in the Brave browser at
| any point in time is enough to eternally dissuade me from
| using it.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| The BAT (and before it, Bitcoin) is there as an optional
| feature. It's not on or enabled by default. It's there for
| users who wish to anonymously earn rewards for their
| attention, and use those rewards to support content
| creators on the Web.
| smoldesu wrote:
| ...except those "rewards" don't ever reach the creators
| pockets, unless they're savvy enough to make their own
| ERC wallet and go through the collection process.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| "If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user's
| contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser
| for 90 days. [...] At the end of the 90 day period, any
| contributions marked for unverified publishers will be
| released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser
| except to go to verified creators."
|
| https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds
| smoldesu wrote:
| Case in point.
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| The only issue you have left with BAT is user education,
| got it.
|
| So thankfully the tech is solid. Now just UX polishing
| and onboarding.
|
| Personally, I think you're just being obtuse and looking
| for a problem.
|
| -- edit --
|
| @dang, go fuck yourself, seriously.
|
| Until this edit I haven't said anything offensive. I've
| simply been a contrarian for many topics: technical,
| social, political, agricultural, philosophical. It seems
| you don't want a Socrates? Too bad.
|
| I can't help you allow these topics and other commenters
| post their opinions and I have opposing opinions. I'm
| always as respectful as the person I'm responding to is.
|
| I also don't bring the topics up in the first place, yet
| you target my response for bring a flamewar? Why not the
| post I was responding to with the opposing opinion?
|
| How is "got it" more offensive than "Case in point." How
| is pointing out GP's actions offensive? Care to point out
| exactly what you found so offensive?
|
| Again, go fuck yourself. You know what you're doing.
|
| Censorship isn't cool. Your Marxist, CCP dick-sucking
| side won't win.
|
| Go let China bend you and YCombinator over some more.
|
| That's offensive, true but offensive, until now I haven't
| posted anything offensive.
|
| Great moderating job dumbfuck.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the
| site guidelines and attacking other users. Seriously not
| cool.
|
| Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598433.
| Draken93 wrote:
| Brave displays if a website is registered for the reward
| programm...
| jonathansampson wrote:
| [This post describes the behavior of Brave Payments in
| last 2018. It is not an accurate description for how the
| system works today, in 2021].
|
| No, creators did not have to be savvy enough to make
| their own ERC-20 wallet. We worked with Uphold at the
| time. Creators could verify with Uphold (a wallet would
| be created for them), and we would then send Brave's BAT
| (earmarked for the creator by Brave users) from our own
| settlement wallet over to the creator.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| I have a few websites and receive payments from Brave Rewards
| almost every month. They pay me in BAT, but since I don't
| care about BAT or can use it directly, it gets converted to
| my local currency, which I then can use to pay for stuff.
|
| It's a mistake to assume something is nonsense or bad just
| because crypto is involved. Provided that you can convert it
| to something usable, it doesn't really matter if you're paid
| in dollars, BAT or something else.
| simonw wrote:
| How much are you earning? A few dollars a month or
| something more substantial?
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| A little over 800 BAT this year:
| https://i.imgur.com/p7o6QKT.png
|
| That's ~400 dollars at current BAT prices ($0.49) or
| ~1200 dollars at the price BAT was ~1 month ago ($1.50).
|
| It's not _a lot_ , BAT value isn't very stable and I'd
| make more money with Google Adsense, but this comes from
| users that block ads anyway. 400 is better than 0.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| That, and anytime there's a critical comment on hackernews
| their employee's come flying in to do damage control.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Yes, it happens in every thread about Brave. Full-on damage
| control at the smallest mention, which says a lot.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Depends are which side of the table you're sitting at.
|
| I like Brave and many other people do. Just look at any
| of the other HN posts about Brave.
|
| Since I like Brave, from this side of the table it looks
| like the anti-Brave people come out in full force to try
| to spew the same old crap and badmouth Brave. At the
| point it is the tired old crap, which most has been
| debunked already.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| With the referral program and integration with a
| cryptocurrency, anyone can shill for it. It's hard if not
| impossible to know if someone promoting Brave has a stake
| in BAT or not.
|
| Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth")
| don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn
| people.
| cheschire wrote:
| That's a romantic view. There's folks on HN working for
| direct competitors of brave. I doubt that everyone
| defending brave is a shill, or that everyone criticizing
| it does so with the purest intent as you're suggesting.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| The only real competitors for Brave are other
| cryptocurrencies, which yes there are many. I feel
| there's plenty of reasons to not like Brave and few if
| any are about suggesting a superior cryptocurrency.
|
| The only non-compromised Brave users I've come across are
| mobile, and they are the ones that find using the Firefox
| add-ons menu to install uBlock origin too complicated.
| They are unlikely to learn the BAT system.
| maeil wrote:
| There is hardly a significant website out there with a
| higher concentration of Google and Microsoft employees
| than Hackernews, in light of which that's quite the
| baffling comment to make.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| I'm guessing you consider Google/Microsoft a competitor
| to Brave. Google I might get, Microsoft I don't.
|
| Neither consider Brave any real threat. Another commenter
| said "romantic view" - I think that applies here.
| bartvk wrote:
| I happen to like that counterpoint. It doesn't feel like
| damage control, it feels like what they're doing, is worthy
| of discussion and they don't shy away from it.
| nextstep wrote:
| Wow, thank you for sharing. I think I'll stick with Google for
| now because they've never done anything morally questionable.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Seriously. For a privacy focused org to have these moral
| failings makes me skeptical they won't abuse users' trust in
| the future. I still don't think it's right to accept donations
| on behalf of someone you have no prior agreement with.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| That's a misleading way to frame it; Brave distributed BAT
| tokens to its users at the time (this was in 2018). We then
| asked those users to give (or "mark") those tokens to their
| favorite content creators. Some gave them to verified
| creators (who were shown with a check-mark, similar to
| Twitter), while others gave them to unverified creators (who
| had no distinguishing marks, similar again to Twitter). When
| the creator was unverified, the BAT (which Brave gave to the
| user) was deposited into a settlement wallet, waiting to be
| claimed (similar to how PayPal lets you email money to
| others). Needless to say, there were may naive UI/UX
| components in the product and process, and the community
| feedback that we acted upon (quickly, within a couple days)
| was phenomenal. Read more at https://brave.com/rewards-
| update/.
| SahAssar wrote:
| When comparing to twitter you fail to mention two large
| differences:
|
| 1. You don't donate to people via twitter.
|
| 2. The people on twitter actually signed up for twitter.
|
| If you actually think it was a mistake then perhaps stop
| defending it. If you don't think it was a mistake then stop
| explaining away to controversy by saying it was "naive
| UI/UX".
| jonathansampson wrote:
| I'm defending _the model_ , but not that particular
| iteration of the UI/UX. People weren't donating their own
| money at the time either; they were effectively telling
| Brave who they'd like to support. Brave would then take
| Brave's BAT tokens (which we set aside for this purpose),
| and marked them for that creator (we would then engage in
| outreach efforts).
| opheliate wrote:
| I disagree with you that it's a misleading way to frame
| your company's actions. Even if users all knew that the
| creators had no relationship with Brave, the company was
| still accepting donations on their behalf, which is what
| the parent comment said.
|
| And to be clear, I'm _highly_ doubtful that the users were
| all aware that there was no relationship there. Framing the
| distinction as being between "verified" and "unverified"
| creators is disingenuous IMO: On any other platform,
| creators being "unverified" would mean they'd signed up,
| but just hadn't confirmed some details yet. The comparison
| of the check-marks to Twitter is also very strange,
| Twitter's own UI would prime users to think that a check-
| mark signified a notable user, not just any user who'd
| signed up. Whereas Brave's "unverified" users have no
| relationship to the company whatsoever.
|
| Perhaps this was all just naivete on the part of Brave, but
| it's very concerning to me that a company which
| (presumably) intends to become the de-facto method of
| monetising content could possibly be so naive as to how
| their actions would be perceived.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Didn't even realize the extent of the referral codes. Imagine
| if Chrome auto-inserted their own amazon affiliate links when
| people typed in Amazon.com - people would be up in arms.
| vntok wrote:
| Why would people be in arms? Seems like a perfectly fine
| thing to do. They are literally referring people with buy
| intent to amazon's deep product pages.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I've since clarified my comment, I meant if Chrome inserted
| affiliate links, not Google (search).
|
| For chrome doing it, the same applies to Brave as those
| people would have visited binance.us regardless of if Brave
| inserted their referral code link there.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| It's traffic attribution; Brave showed the affiliate option
| to users via a pre-search UI panel in the browser
| (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png). Users could then decide
| to use the top suggested result, or not. The mistake here was
| matching on fully-qualified URLs, as opposed to search-input
| exclusively (the intended behavior). You can read more about
| it here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-
| sites/. No element of this is malicious.
|
| As for what others do, traffic attribution is common. Open
| Firefox and perform a search from the address bar. Long
| before you press Enter, Firefox has already sent keystrokes
| off to Google.com (assuming you haven't changed your default
| search engine), along with a tag on the URL identifying
| Firefox as the source of the traffic.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The problem is that referral programs are intended to get
| people who wouldn't have signed up for a site to use it,
| and for binance that means getting people not already
| signed up to sign up and trade crypto on binance.us. This
| includes the referer getting up to 40% of trading fees[0].
| Even for the example where a user chooses between the
| search 'binance' and `binance.us/?ref=`, in both cases they
| were already planning to visit and/or sign up for the
| crypto trading site, Brave didn't do any referring
| themselves. The profit sharing aspect makes it far-removed
| from the notion of just being for traffic attribution.
|
| 0: https://support.binance.us/hc/en-
| us/articles/360047428793-Re...
| jonathansampson wrote:
| If you read the post covering the feature in Brave, and
| reviewed the screenshots of its implementation, you'd see
| that the intent here was to respond to user input, and
| _offer_ the user the option of using Brave 's referral
| link. The intent was never to _coerce_ users into using
| the link; it was merely presented as an option--a clean
| and clear way to support Brave development.
|
| It is still an example of traffic attribution, as is the
| case with Firefox sending your keystrokes to Google
| asynchronously (marked with the Firefox identifier). This
| is how Firefox continues to get paid, by sending users
| over to the Google search engine. In the case of Brave,
| this identifier was shown to the user prior to any
| network activity. That isn't the case with Firefox (and
| nearly every other popular browser).
| judge2020 wrote:
| If binance is fine with it then sure, but it's not like
| Binance is getting any extra sign-ups thanks to Brave
| from these suggestions, they're just giving up a
| percentage of their trading fees when it happens (the
| user would have signed up regardless of if you allowed
| them to use the optional referral code or not).
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Fair point. Agreed :)
| [deleted]
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I do my best to avoid sarcasm, but but but... have you looked
| at other players in search?
| jonathansampson wrote:
| You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; that
| isn't the case. Brave is designed in every way to preclude
| abuse from the design stage, and with a _Can 't Be Evil_
| mindset, as opposed to the _Don 't Be Evil_ of Google. If you
| have questions about Brave, or Brave Search, we're always happy
| to chat.
|
| - 2018 Rewards Update documented at https://brave.com/rewards-
| update/
|
| - Affiliate Codes explained at https://brave.com/referral-
| codes-in-suggested-sites/
|
| - The Tor/DNS issue resulted from https://brave.com/privacy-
| updates-6/
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| I appreciate the response! I stand by what I said, but I do
| appreciate you adding your perspective and sharing links so
| that others can read what Brave as an organization has to say
| about these incidents.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| Fair enough; I can respect that :)
|
| Always happy to chat if anybody has any other questions
| about Brave.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong;
|
| They're not saying Brave did anything intentionally wrong,
| they're just big enough mistakes that it's not possible for
| them, personally, to trust the organization.
|
| > those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an
| organization
| howolduis wrote:
| then what about this?:
|
| > On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave
| inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of
| Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money.
| Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of
| other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to
| the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and
| called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting".
|
| Seems intentional... Don't insult our intelligence and tell
| us that this was an "accident" or "unintended mistaken".
| jonathansampson wrote:
| That was addressed in my comment (the one you're
| responding to) with this link:
| https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
|
| Briefly, we added a way for users to support Brave
| without having to make financial contributions. They
| could simply opt to use one of our affiliate codes for a
| few poplar sites/services.
|
| We added a feature to Brave which responded to user
| search input, and offered affiliate links for relevant
| results. You can see a screenshot of what that looked
| like at https://brave.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png. This didn't involve
| any user data, didn't rewrite links on pages, didn't
| redirect network requests, or touch the area of
| privacy/security in any way. Seemed like a good idea :)
|
| When the feature actually launched, users quickly
| realized that the logic was handling _fully qualified
| URLs_ in additional to search input. You can see a
| screenshot of that at https://brave.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/image2-1.png. This was the
| mistake that needed to be corrected.
|
| I hope that helps clarify things a little. Again, there
| was no impact to user data or privacy, and Brave made $0
| on this feature. Thankfully, our community is attentive,
| and yields prompt feedback when mistakes are made.
| Fortunately we were able to resolve the issue quickly and
| get a fix out to users.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| It's funny seeing all these folks nitpicking at Brave but who
| are fine using Google or Microsoft every day.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Citation needed.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >It's funny seeing all these folks nitpicking at Brave but
| who are fine using Google or Microsoft every day.
|
| How do you know this?
| ibraheemdev wrote:
| What index is being used?
| pythux wrote:
| We use our own independent index.
| counternotions wrote:
| A likely monetization by Brave will be prioritizing search
| results for verified content creators within the BAT token
| ecosystem (a la Twitter check-mark).
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Not that they're required to do so and more choice can be good,
| but why didn't they work with DDG? I see they've gone ahead and
| stolen the bangs (!w) feature for themselves.
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| DDG just uses Bing results. This solution is completely
| independent.
|
| You may ask why that's needed, just recently DDG was censoring
| the "tank man" photo on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square
| because Bing was censoring it.
|
| This new indexer is very much welcome and I hope it stays free
| of censorship from the CCP, marxists, and others.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >This solution is completely independent.
|
| It is not. It is Cliqz tailcat plus _Bing_. Censorship from
| Bing will end up at brave too.
| pythux wrote:
| "Cliqz tailcat" is an independent index and we rely on
| third-parties like Bing for a small portion of requests
| where we are not confident enough (although we would be
| able to serve 99% of the requests, users expect the best
| quality). For the long answer you can read here:
| https://search-dev.brave.com/help/independence
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Yes that much is clear, but DDG has a privacy bent to their
| engine too. It just seems like working with DDG to remove
| that fault would be beneficial to both parties.
|
| If I recall, DDG chose to use Bing to remove Google from the
| equation but also prevent the need to reinvent the wheel.
|
| Brave for all their technological progress and talk about
| improving the web, often seem to promote only themselves with
| their advancements. They aren't required to share anything
| however. The parroting of bangs is just a bit hostile is all.
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| Bing and thus DDG's index really isn't that good.
|
| Is Microsoft an underdog now? Why do you consider them any
| better than Google, especially after the "tank man" fiasco?
|
| I don't see why it's a bad thing to make your own thing or
| to only promote your own company.
|
| Brave isn't reinventing the wheel either, they purchased &
| revived Tailcats from Cliqz (https://0x65.dev/)
|
| The bang operators are a small feature that are easy to
| implement, nothing special. Taking inspiration and features
| from competitors is nothing new.
|
| Even in this thread there was a user asking for them,
| saying they'd switch over if Brave implements them (they
| already have them obviously)
|
| I don't even think DDG came up with them first...
| toper-centage wrote:
| Did DDG have a trademark ovet bangs? That's just a feature that
| users expect. Other small search engine frontends have those
| too.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| Very impressed. Results seem already better than duckduckgo.
| qwertox wrote:
| This is Cliqz's Tailcat search engine. Hubert Burda Media sold it
| to Brave earlier this year and got some shares for it in return.
|
| I just hope that they really don't collect data or profile users,
| as there could exist the concern that it would get shared with
| Hubert Burda Media. Or if Hubert Burda Media sees this as a way
| to shape the search experience in favor of publishers, once it
| has gained a big enough user base.
|
| https://brave.com/brave-search/
| [deleted]
| jppope wrote:
| Definitely worth giving it a try for a week or two. I already
| noticed that they put stackoverflow snippets right in the results
| which is fab
| staunch wrote:
| It's good for Google to have competition but they, or someone
| else, could just buy Brave and mangle or kill it.
|
| Turning web search into a _protocol_ is what is needed. Maybe
| Brave could do this by sharing their index and creating a
| standard system for sharing indexes, spam blocklists, and
| whatever else is needed to operate an open web index that
| competes with Google.
| knz_ wrote:
| Brave isn't competition to google. Brave browser is just
| chromium under the hood, and their search is clearly just
| piggybacking off of google and bing results like every other
| third rate search engine.
|
| The entire reason brave exists is so they can sell metrics data
| and push some garbage scamcoin.
| dylkil wrote:
| it failed my first test of returning stackoverflow for a code
| error
|
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=null+pointer+exception
| jaflo wrote:
| Not sure if they updated it recently, but it pulls up all SO
| instant answer for me.
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(page generated 2021-06-23 23:03 UTC)