Hacker News Reader

Comment by Archipelagia | Hacker News Reader

Not the biggest fan of Brave myself, but they seem to actually get extra points in my eyes for adding the paid option. It's not like you can pay $3 to Google to get them to stop surveilling you.

On a bigger note, monetizing search without ads seem to be a pretty tricky business model. Especially if you want to move beyond being a niche product; even an average HN reader would be hard to convince to pay for a regular subscription, so with the general public I can't imaging the hassle.

What are other ways search engines could monetize without taking money either from users or from people that want to show something to them?

View on HN

It's a slippery slope though. We saw this with Google, so it's not like it's a straw man. First it's small, discrete ads to the side. Then it's the first few entries are ads, but are marked as such. Then it's the first page of entries. Then the marking disappears. (Yeah, they put it back eventually after a backlash. I wouldn't expect a company like Brave to do the same, though.)

I just go with a search engine I pay for that doesn't offer any ad-supported stuff (kagi.com). That way, I'm directly supporting the service, and they have zero incentive to start showing me stuff that other people are paying for me to see and which I definitely don't want to see.

It's a very good point that companies will (eventually) look to maximize revenue and thus even companies that start out with grand ideas of being "different" succumb to that pressure.

A strong countervailing force (in some markets) is competition. If Google had more competition (both in terms of a independent search service and access to be the default search option in browsers) they might have to start caring more about the search experience and privacy.

> I wouldn't expect a company like Brave to do the same, though.

Companies change. When the leadership/guard at a company changes, or with enough investor pressure, policies can easily change from benevolent to a money grab.

But there is no privacy with payed service. Your search history is linked with your credit card = name.

> It's not like you can pay $3 to Google to get them to stop surveilling you.

You can, at least for Youtube - the premium offering is ad-free. In fact, that's the only reason I subscribe - not the content - because my entire family uses my account or is part of my Google "family" to bypass YT ads. Worth the (ever increasing) monthly fee.

My guess is that this only exists to foil Netflix, and if Netflix didn't have an ad-free service, Google would make this option cost a lot more or remove it entirely.

> You can, at least for Youtube - the premium offering is ad-free.

ad-free =/= surveillance free.

Please offer some proof that Google does more surveillance than Brave.

Assuming that's a good faith question (I'm skeptical), let's click through some random HN headlines and use uMatrix to count how many requests for Javascript and other garbage are being made to Google servers, and how many are made to Brave's servers.

First off: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/mastering-stratego-the-classic...

By my count that has two requests to googleapis.com, one to gstatic.com, and one to googletagmanager, but none to any Brave sites.

Next up: https://www.thefire.org/news/free-speech-culture-elon-musk-a...

Requests googletagmanager, but nothing from Brave.

Next: https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2022/11/30/understanding-c...

Makes requests to googletagmanager ang googleapis.com. Brave completely missing.

And: https://twitter.com/coinbasewallet/status/159835481973503180...

Sends requests to google-analytics.com, but Brave is a no show again

And finally: https://jakespracher.medium.com/machines-and-chaos-9f0e87eeb...

Which uses google-analytics, but nothing from Brave.

Practically every commercial website on the internet has Google spyware tied in somehow. And just to spell it out, every time your browser sends a request to one of the Google servers, they're keeping track and surveiling you.

Google has the data on most credit card transactions in the US. Transactions that do not go through Google at all. They are tracking the crap out of you everywhere

I mean, just the fact that they track your location would put their surveillance way ahead of Brave, no?

https://privacyspy.org

> You can, at least for Youtube - the premium offering is ad-free

No, it's free of YT ads but countless creators embed ads in their videos, sometimes of pretty shady businesses (see recent Established Titles controversy).

The only way to get rid of all YouTube ads doesn't cost anything (uBlock + Sponsorblock). And if I pay for content I prefer to do it via Patreon, because why would I reward YouTube for constantly acting against the interests of users and content creators?

Well it's not $3, it's 12, so much more

you can just use ublock origin.

If search engines were considered important enough to be a public utility, one could be funded by taxpayer dollars. Now of course, search results can be heavily politicized, but I suppose the same is true of which books a library decides to carry.

Yeah, I just don't trust the govt to not politicize search, or at the very least, to not use search results to manufacture consent or other nefarious intentions.

NPR comes to mind.

With private companies, at least there's some visage of a separation from state influence although we are seeing the lash back now with Twitter.

Search engines are important, but they’re funded quite well with ads, so why would anybody go through the effort to make it a public utility?

So that search engines work.

Google search has been crippled by ads. Sometimes people just want nice stuff and a search engine that wasn't designed to mislead (https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9768350/google-ads-searc...) and where the amount of money paid doesn't dictate what is easy to find would be a great asset to everybody. No company has risen to give us a powerful search engine that isn't also a cesspool of marketing bullshit so it would be reasonable for people to seek an option that serves the interests of the public.

I suppose if the government felt that ads-supported search engines had such misaligned incentives that it would be net beneficial for society to create one without such incentives, then that might serve as a justification. I don’t actually think this is plausible, just making an analogy with say private fire departments.

> funded by taxpayer dollars.

No thanks, I'd rather not use money coerced from innocent citizens for making a web search engine. Let's use that money for the smallest possible set of limited services.

No. We need decentralised federated solution.

> It's not like you can pay $3 to Google to get them to stop surveilling you.

Well sort of. You can pay them for YouTube Premium and watch videos without ads. I might pay for an ad-free Google Search but I have developed an almost reflexive habit of ignoring the ads on Google Search anyway. It's much easier to just look past them in the search results, as opposed to when watching a video where you have no choice.

And I'm sure they are surveilling me regardless.

I would pay Google 30 just for search+maps of it came without tracking and ads

They'd happily take your money and track and ad-bomb you anyway, the ads will be ingeniously disguised as "valuable information" but they'd be there.

Perhaps check https://kagi.com/pricing

A good search engine, also uses Google results I think.

My solution is using uBlock Origin without signing in to Google and a VPN.

I'm not concerned about ads because I literally never see them.

And uBlock blocks the tracking.

Do you not use uBlock Origin? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Your browser has unique fingerprint regardless of VPN or uBlock. If you want be anonymous, use Tor.

Make it a 501(c)(3) non-profit, like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia.

Or at least a Social Purpose Corporation like Purism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com