Comment by jonathansampson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonathansampson | Hacker News Reader

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jonathansampson

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.

Disclosure: the author of this comment appears to be a Senior Developer Relations Specialist at Brave.

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.

"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?

> 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.

What about Safari?

Safari was covered in the aforementioned browser-privacy study as well: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. It finished with Chrome and Firefox in 2nd place (behind Brave).

you work for Brave. I can't take what you say on face value

Please don't take my words for granted. Verify everything. If you wish to prod a little, I'm always happy to chat :-)

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.

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

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.

a slider that adds weight to time stamps

Ideally have all three of those date types as sort options. Definitely one of the first two as default though.

I appreciate the reply

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