Brave Search beta
search.brave.com
search.brave.com
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.
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.
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.
command ddgGoogleBang composite js (new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)).get('q') + ' !g' | urlmodify_js -q q | open / <c-e> !g <enter>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/1202610687621/?s...
Google Search results are definitely "public data" so long as Google provides them to anyone who asks.
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.
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.
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.
If a monkey can't copyright a selfie because they're not a person, an algorithmically generated spew of stuff Google ripped from elsewhere certainly lacks merit for copyright.
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."
(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.)
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.
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.
In an indirect way, it’s possible by doing !sp on DDG, which redirects the search to startpage, which shows untracked google results.
i would rather support and spread the word about search engines that don't rely solely on google
Yes, same applies to DDG/Bing though.
then it seems they're being quite slow, since the acquisition happened almost 2 years ago.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We'll see which comes first. That post, or "Our Great Journey."
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...
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.
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.
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.
> Not everyone has that luxury.
Defend that statement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, just use https://startpage.com/ and get proxied Google results. Searx is another alternative.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Yep. The missteps that they've made over the past few years do not give me any confidence in the future of the project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
- 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
Now I just prefix my query with !py and I’m immediately taken to the docs.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
Google is taking page content from sites and putting it on their own search result page; Brave is taking search-result links from Google and putting them on their own search result page.
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.
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.
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
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://&>'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?
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.
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
Regarding number of pages of results, please see my answer on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597911
TL;DR: we currently show the equivalent of 2 pages of results and will consider more in the future.
StartPage shows Google results through a proxy for improved privacy. I am quite happy with it.
Been with them for about a decade but this is too much
JS: Startpage does use Javascript, but only to enhance user interaction with our site and improve the search results we provide.
ADs: Startpage displays at most 3 ads. Like other private search engines, Startpage's revenue model is based on contextual ads.
Let me know if you have questions or suggestions.
What has happened with this investment, we've hired additional engineers and added new features.
And, System1 doesn't receive any user personal data because we don't collect it and never will. Why did System1 invest? "System1 is interested in Startpage's ad revenue, not its data" Source: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4017337/privacy-focused-sea...
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.
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.
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.
Once DDG is big enough, they will be forced to do the same.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
No G, I didn't want to search for what you suggested, really not.
Brave is just a "pop-privacy" company. I will skip this one...
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.
It’s always bothered me about Google that there’s no sort feature, especially by date
I appreciate the reply
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.
That tactic is definitely a red flag.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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)
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.
That's not you.
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?
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.
Also, Vivaldi is entirely moddable.
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.
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.
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.
Brave isn’t a browser I use but you guys are not even reading the comments you’re responding to.
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.
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.
Brave doesn't make money by blocking third-party ads; that's a privacy and security decision. Brave could default to no-blocking (which would be unwise, given the threat to users), and still have its own ad model of displaying ad notifications.
> …people blocking ads for their own protection…
This is why people install Brave; for the privacy and security benefits. This is the baseline experience in Brave.
> When somebody uses the Brave browser and has opted in to other ads…
Why do you assume people aren't using Brave for their own protection? For many people, including myself, advertising isn't the motivator of installing an ad/content blocker. The primary reason is the security/privacy risk of running a small app (which is what modern third-party digital ads are) on my machine.
So if the problem is security and privacy, and not advertising, it makes sense why somebody would opt to participate in an alternative advertising model which does not have the same security/privacy risks, and even rewards the user (with 70% of the ad revenue) for their attention.
> I'm going to check out these other ads, make some money for myself and for Brave…
And for the publisher, since the default configuration of Brave is to queue up auto-contributions for the verified sites you visit.
OK, sure, lets rewrite it as "Brave is attempting to monetize other people intellectual property by striping it of ads for the protection of readers."
And sure, you could argue that you are providing a service to readers. Unfortunately, in order to provide tha service you must harm the content providers by denying them ad revenue, whether or not they are actually doing any harmful tracking.
This is why I believe content providers will come after you once you get big enough.
And you might be able to scare users, but I doubt you will be able to convince a court that just collecting the data is harmful in any meaningful way.
But come on, we're all tech folks here, Brave is only blocking 3rd party tracking, the 1st parties are still tracking what pages on their site you are reading. Facebook knows what you see on Facebook. Newscorp and Tencent and Apple all know what you are reading across their own IPs. Netflix knows what you are watching and Spotify knows what you are listening to. You have to be logged in after all.
And anyway, I'm sure 3rd parties have started serving up scripts that run 1st party now, just proxxied through the first party server.
Update: And to be clear, if you were doing this all for the good of society alone I would cheer you on, but because you are doing it for profit it becomes unethical in my mind.
Now I know nobody asked, but if I were Mr Eich and I wanted to do this is a way that _was_ ethical, I would attempt to create a parallel internet that was attractive to both users and content providers. I think both parties need to opt-in to this new trackingless internet.
I have a lot of crazy ideas for making this crazy parallel internet good for everybody, but I would be here all night.
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.
Ah yes completely anonymous, unless you want to withdraw https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
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.
I don't understand why Firefox gets this benefit of doubt and other browsers (e.g. Brave) do not.
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.
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)
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?
> Note that choosing this option has no effect on your privacy.
https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-...
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...
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/20210622172743/https://search.br...
Google results for "gccgo" (proxied through Startpage): https://web.archive.org/web/20210622172939/https://startpage...
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/https://startpage...
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.
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.
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
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.
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
* Powered by Google
"However for some features, like searching for images, Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing."
[1] - https://0x65.dev/
I know TailCat is open source... But what about Brave Search? Any clue?
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?
Were it a nonprofit trust, I'd be right there with you. But not a for-profit company, and sure as HELL not Google.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-05/a-new-search-engine.htm...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth") don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn people.
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.
Neither consider Brave any real threat. Another commenter said "romantic view" - I think that applies here.
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.
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".
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.
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.
0: https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360047428793-Re...
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).
- 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/
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
> 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".
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.
Always happy to chat if anybody has any other questions about Brave.
How do you know this?
It seems it can be disabled in the settings (https://search.brave.com/settings) but it's opt-out rather than opt-in.
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!
Note that I already liked cliqz before (properly evaluating how good a search engine is is hard, so that might have introduced bias).
> 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
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?
At present we default to country US. We're looking to implement better defaults soon.
We do hope you stick around!
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)
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.
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].
[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
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.
>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.
This makes no sense. What I said is still there. 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.
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.monkey.an...
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey
5. https://pt.surveymonkey.com/
(change page)
6. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cool.monkey.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:
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey
3. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cool.monkey.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.monkey.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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
Here are the reasons
Note: im not aganist anyone.
Yes, Gigablast is open source and i trust gigablast but privte.sh isn't open source. They said they will release code but from the past 1 year they didn't releas.
2nd reason is privatesh is owned by pia which is based in us. Since we all pia keeps logs about metadata it isn't secure.
Note: metadata is also important
3rd reason : There is a lot more to develop
4th reason : It has no anonymous view. It is better to add anonymous view like startpage. Startpage anonymous is more secure but i do not trust startpage because it has no source code. Maybe in future private.sh could develop.
The page seems to waste space. I'd need a compact mode to use this search. The UI is difficult for me.
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.
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
We are aware of the issue. We have a fix pending.
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.
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!
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 #
damn, alright, you got me. I'll try it out as default for a while
Going to try setting it as the default...
we are working on pushing a fix out shortly. Stay tuned.
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
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.
?????
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
But I think your case is also worth adding to the conversation, although I don't believe removing results collides with privacy.
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.
> Brave Search uses private usage metrics to estimate overall activity and performance. You can turn off this option in Settings.
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.
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.
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).
Advertising is a bigger business than selling browsers.
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.
This search engine is just trying to copy google's with a few tweaks in the result, not that interesting.
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?
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.
But, I learned something new about Cleveland Ohio in early 20th century, so I guess it's not that bad.
I found that Google still does these things much better.
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.
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
``` Jan 12, 2021 - var ytplayer = ytplayer || ...tps:\/\/s.youtube.com\/api\/stats\/atr?docid=7EqnoEljHCw\&ei=aL-MX5nwOfjOzLUPxLWJiAw\&len=206\&ns=yt\&plid=AAWx-WOvfFqbWF59\&ver=2\",\"elapsedMediaTimeSeconds\":5}},\"videoDetails\":{\"videoId\":\"7EqnoEljHCw\",\"title\":\"** ... ```
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?
!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
A shebang is something else ('#!').
- !d (it’s already DuckDuckGo, so !d is “dictionary”)
- !mj (it’s !mojeek)
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.
so privacy is great value prop. but not so much that i am willing to pay for it while living with worse search quality.
- 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.
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
Wonderful stuff, best hill to die on.
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.
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.
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.
---
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Between Brave and Vivaldi, I think moving out of the Google world for common folks is a possibility now.
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.
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.
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...
It is not. It is Cliqz tailcat plus Bing. Censorship from Bing will end up at brave too.
"GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web" https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf
I almost forgot about the blacklist! https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I left it for the readers to form their own opinion. Something you apparently are loath to do.