Brave launches Search Ads in key markets after successful test phase | Hacker News Reader

Brave launches Search Ads in key markets after successful test phase

brave.com

32 pointsLorenDB95 comments

Why would you even use brave? You want to view advertisements just use Chrome. If you don't there's Firefox and ublock origin.

It’s one of the few options (the only other being Orion afaik) that you can natively block ads from the browser on iOS. The other solutions like firefox/chrome/safari have to go through the declarative content blocking API since you can’t install Chrome/Firefox plugins.

Which is why I happily use Orion without having to deal with that noise

This post is about the search engine, not the web browser. I use Brave instead of Google search because Google presents me with captchas every time I use it, and Brave's search engine is good enough. I already use Firefox and ublock origin.

Thanks for this. I don't get why most comments are about the browsers...

I tried kagi, the results start great and get noticeably better even within the free trial period. I don't have to worry about ads and I've blocked or lowered all poor quality sites on the fly. I sort results by tracker count and find most of the time results with lowest trackers have the best content for what I am looking for. Anything I couldn't find was also not findable with google or bing. I started a year of paid subscription and I don't think I'll ever go back to any ad-funded search or any free search that might be tempted to add ads later.

I really recommend to give it a try.

its a one-click stop for most people. Though all I can think of is:

"All ads are bad, block them... except for mine."

Chrome is heavy spyware that scans your whole PC by default under the guise of "chrome is an antivirus now". Chrome tracking data is used for google's advertising wing and they lied about it extensively, which was obvious to many but now there's proof because of the recent leak.

Brave does not do this. Pretty much without exception, anyone using chrome is better served by using brave. It doesnt mean brave is perfect or the best, but holding up chrome as better is a joke.

Brave also didn't do ads.

But now they do.

The only real constraint on what Brave will and will not do is their VC pressures to make money vs reputational damage. And reputational damage isn't all that expensive.

Ads were always part of the Brave experience via the BAT program. Brave doesn't want there to be no ads, just ads that are non-intrusive and non-spyware. Duckduckgo does search term correlated ads as well, and I think its a fine way to build a revenue stream.

> The only real constraint on what Brave will and will not do is their VC pressures to make money vs reputational damage. And reputational damage isn't all that expensive.

The VC's will be disappointed because Eich & co have said they will never exit through an IPO. They don't want to give up control like Google did.

Except Brave privacy policy directly contradicts your claims (many times).

https://brave.com/privacy/browser/

> Safe Browsing > The Brave Browser automatically uses Google Safe Browsing to help protect you against websites, downloads and extensions that are known to be unsafe (such as sites that are fraudulent or that host malware).

From your link:

> We proxy these requests through Brave’s servers to reduce the amount of information sent to Google (for example, we remove your IP address) to protect against Google profiling or tracking you when using Safe Browsing.

You have to be maximally naive and gullible to believe this protects you from profiling/tracking.

Oh no. I'm maximally naive.

Holding up Brave as some sort of privacy-preserving, ad-blocking replacement to Chrome is a complete joke and 100% untrue.

i use all but for different purposes.

brave gets me chromium and blocking by default use as disposable browser with history.

Firefox is main and will use that if i want info to by synced.

Chrome is the last resort browser that i'll use if i have to login but is broken in firefox.

Nexusmods CloudFlare keeps blocking firefox but not chrome. Bank site won' let me use firefox.

> blocking by default

Except it doesn't block all ads by default at all.

It blocks YouTube ads but leaves some first party ads in place. The YouTube ad blocking is the most important to me.

Sounds like you have no reason to use brave over ublock origin.

ublock origin works on chrome

But won't work as well once Manifest V2 is dropped from Chrome

It "works" on chrome, but it works best on firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

And google keeps threatening to make it not work at all on Chrome. Most recently, yesterday [1], with warning banners harassing users supposedly rolling out on Monday.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begi...

Mozilla is in bed with Google. I use brave because:

* it has reasonable way of funding, crypto may suck, but it is believable they will not sell my data

* anonymous bookmark sync with multiple profiles. With Chrome and Firefox I have to sign up for each sync.

* Chrome based debug tools

* It is usable without any plugins. In some environments I do not want to install some questionable plugins, that may change ownership anytime! (It is already named "Ublock Origin", ownership already changed )

* Proprietary Video Codecs support out of the box on Linux. Some distros do not have it, and I do not want to enable community repos.

> it has reasonable way of funding, crypto may suck, but it is believable they will not sell my data

You can rest assured that Brave absolutely will and does sell your data.

> anonymous bookmark sync with multiple profiles. With Chrome and Firefox I have to sign up for each sync.

Nothing at all anonymous about it, firstly. Secondly, you can import/export bookmarks from Firefox and Chrome and do an actual 'anonymous' sync that way.

> Chrome based debug tools

Like.... chrome has?

> It is usable without any plugins. In some environments I do not want to install some questionable plugins, that may change ownership anytime! (It is already named "Ublock Origin", ownership already changed )

No it's not. It's completely unusable if you actually don't want ads.

> Proprietary Video Codecs support out of the box on Linux. Some distros do not have it, and I do not want to enable community repos.

The only reason prop codec implementations are not supported in some (not most) repos is because of licensing/OSS policy... which would equally apply to Brave within those same repos.

Looks a lot like Brave's overall strategy (not just this announcement but the whole gist of the company) is to try and tap in to a part of Google's revenue stream by innovating in the web browser space. It is a bold one if so and I wish them every success.

It is a pity the managers over at Mozilla don't think Google is worth challenging. If someone ever succeeds at dragging AdSense into the OSS world / a big free market the world would be very different. There might finally find a use case for crypto. I suppose the fraud might be too much, but there must be an interesting commercial model in there somewhere.

> If someone ever succeeds at dragging AdSense into the OSS world

The absolute last thing I want is for the OSS world to fall prey to the perverse incentives of the ad industry.

Advertising needs to be purged, not embraced.

Advertising is potentially useful, it's the scale that's a problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g

Like, "Every inch of the new park is covered in sponsor branding" is a problem, but "I had no idea that a store selling towels opened in our town" is also a problem. These are both advertising, at some point you cross from "I didn't know about that, thanks" to "Just fuck off already" and that's too much advertising.

Dispepsi for example, the Negativland album, is premised on the idea that everybody on the entire planet already knows about Coca-Cola and Pepsi, so their continued advertising is entirely futile. Nobody who wants a brown fizzy beverage is unsure whether they could obtain such a thing or what it might be called. So all they're doing is annoying us.

The other purpose of the ad is to keep the product top of mind. Those bubbles-and-ice ads aren't to introduce you to the concept but to remind you that you want one - now.

Sure, there are a lot of potential rationales offered for more and more, and more advertising. But when I looked into it, awareness was literally the only one with clear statistical evidence that independent researchers had gone yeah, that actually works. If you don't tell any customers your product exists, that's definitely not going to help sell more. Story checks out. Beyond that? I haven't seen the evidence.

Obviously the guy at the TV network is not going to tell Jim from Ad Co. that it's futile to advertise Pepsi because everybody knows about Pepsi. And Jim isn't going tell Pepsi's Head of Marketing that it's futile to spend money with Ad Co. because Pepsi makes up a noticeable part of Jim's annual sales bonus. The Head of Marketing would no longer have a job if they stopped advertising, so no fear they will spontaneously realise. All of them will prefer to make up stories for why it makes sense to spend more and more and more on advertising, because they all benefit. But does it actually work?

That is completely true and quite effective. Not sure why you're getting down voted. It's time to do away with the down votes

I already googled for towel shops. Just like everybody else would do. I had to accept the manipulated results and most probably even fell for it.

So why would I need even more ads for the new towel store?

The first practical answer is without ads there wouldn't be a Google. The reason the search index is commercially viable is because it shows ads. The second is maybe you don't know what a towel is, there are a lot born every minute. The third is maybe you won't think of buying a towel - even if you need it - without prompting which I suspect is the case for most people.

I also don't understand the general hate some people have for websites that are commercially viable without charging an entrance fee. Ads are better than the next-best option.

What you actually miss here is the fact that we're getting MORE ads all the time.

It doesn't stop because the shareholders demand more money.

It's not about how google wouldn't be able to exist. They can surely exist as a search engine. It's not that expensive. It's about how google is getting worse and worse because of the greed in this sick system. This is what people hate. There were ads from the beginning on, but it was never so bad as it has become today.

Besides that: advertising is stealing my attention. Not only on the internet (where I just use ublock) but everywhere else. It's a disease. It penetrates my brain. I never asked for this. I feel violated by this industry which single aim it is to do just that and as effective as possible.

I despise it.

> It's not about how google wouldn't be able to exist. They can surely exist as a search engine. It's not that expensive.

How do you expect them to earn money? The reality of the situation is pretty clear on this one, it is ad-supported or irrelevance for search engines. We've been watching this market play out for more than 2 decades.

> What you actually miss here is the fact that we're getting MORE ads all the time.

I'm not missing it, I just don't see why you care. I can understand using an ad-blocker, but to get worked up because a site shows ads to support itself is entitled to the point where it is stupid. Ads mean that freeloaders get something good for free, and the people who pay obviously believe they got a valuable service from the ads, or they wouldn't have bought the advertised thing.

> How do you expect them to earn money?

By manipulating the order of search results, of course.

> The reality of the situation is pretty clear on this one, it is ad-supported or irrelevance for search engines. We've been watching this market play out for more than 2 decades.

There is no "market". There is google. Searching the internet is googling. If they'd just split out the search business today from the whole Alphabet clutter, they would keep on living. They might not generate more profit every quarter, but if they don't have shareholders with a gun at their back, it should be OK and people would still be kept on googling. I'm pretty sure if they'd focus on making search results better, they'd even become more popular.

> I can understand using an ad-blocker, but to get worked up because a site shows ads to support itself is entitled to the point where it is stupid.

Come on...it's not like in the 90s, where you had to have an ad to pay for the hosting. We're beyond this. You get ads because of ads and the revenue you get on top of whatever you are selling.

> Ads mean that freeloaders get something good for free,

They don't get it for free. They pay with their data and attention. Not only that, but they're being profiled, rated and assessed, and it's not like they become free of that if they pay. The ad-machine is all over the place. You constantly pay while what you get back is less and less. See those huge media platforms.

Ads has become a thing where paying for content was just not manageable in proper time. You had to wire money or send it in a letter. Now, things changed, but somehow it is too late. You can and do pay, and you're still served ads and pay with your data and attention on top. It's not about covering costs anymore. It's about giving less for more profits. Every quarter.

As I said before: It's a disease.

>> How do you expect them to earn money?

> By manipulating the order of search results, of course.

That is what they do already. The name for it is advertising! What distinction are you drawing between advertising and this income stream where they manipulate the search results? Is your complaint here that you don't like the ads looking visually different?

The stuff that makes the internet useless as soon as you turn off your adblock.

> "I had no idea that a store selling towels opened in our town" is also a problem

Is it a problem? Maybe in 1995 this would be a problem advertising could fix, but today it's either:

a. I don't need towels so I don't care that this opened.

b. I do need towels and I do a web search for stores that sell towels nearby - at which point I become aware.

Advertising is inferior to an honest catalog of businesses and what they sell - i.e. Google Maps or web search. In the context of web search or business directories, advertising is "putting a finger on the scale" of normal discovery. It's fundamentally dishonest in my opinion.

I agree with this. Advertising as in "being findable" is helpful, advertising as in "shoving things down everyone's throat to make them buy things they didn't know they needed" is unsustainable, intrusive and unnecessarily overwhelming.

Advertising worked OK when everyone understood what it was and how it was necessary to pay for free, or almost free, stuff. I can remember when our local paper used to sell out everywhere on a Thursday afternoon because that was the day when all the job ads were published. No one ever complained there were too many of these. Similarly on a Friday when all the houses for sale or rent were posted.

As happened with other forms of cheap or free media such as regular mail, telephone calls and email, the returns for advertising eventually become a numbers game even when 99.9% of the audience hate them.

> Advertising needs to be purged, not embraced.

I agree, but most people also also feel that content should be free. If content is free, but not ad supported, who pays the people to create it?

Why is it that this community of innovators can’t fathom other ways to fund cool things besides the false dichotomy of customer pays vs we shove ads down customer throat?

Some services seem like facebook and reddit seem ripe for a nonprofit model to use an example that doesn’t require any innovation.

Maybe because y’all are focused on winning big with your options? Maybe that’s the root cause of enshitification?

This innovator actually works for a nonprofit and guess what -- people don't want to pay for news, and those who did at one time are giving much less.[1]

There are a few nonprofit models for social media, and they aren't making a dent in the big monsters. As far as I'm concerned, social media is where ads belong, but maybe that's because I despise it.

The nonprofit model for content, my wheelhouse, is struggling mightily with this issue, but it all comes down to getting donations, government funding, or getting people to work for free. Even this list of "non-reformist reforms"[2] comes down to getting money from the government or consolidating into media co-ops. Public radio stations get a small amount of government funding as you might know, but a journalistic enterprise beholden to its government is probably actually worse than being beholden to advertisers.

So, as a member of this community of innovators, what are your suggestions?

[1] https://logan-gentry.medium.com/giving-was-down-in-2023-but-...

[2] https://lpeproject.org/blog/taking-media-out-of-the-market/

> It is a pity the managers over at Mozilla don't think Google is worth challenging

It's not an easy thing to do when they get half a billion a year from Google.

Google pays them off not to innovate or launch anything that would compete with their search monopoly.

Yes, it's so clear what the deal is.

ADS are cancerous just like crypto stuff. That is the reason I switched to firefox klar & esr on my dailydriver machines and to librewolf on any other machine I had lying around. And search engine wise ecosia, metager and Qwant do a great job.

Brave Search has been a lot better than these other alternatives in my experience. I used to use DDG but the results were always a hit and miss. With Brave Search, I have completely replaced Google.

Especially Metager is real competition to brave search as it using so many sources that it even outlived the ddg/bing attacks.

Does Brave ad blocker block these ads? Or does it only block competing ads?

Its business model has always been the latter, they're just no longer bothering with the pretense of opt-in.

Usually businesses wait until they capture the market before saying the quiet part out loud.

1 - The initial idea to create Brave was to allow users to view ads and get paid for their attention.

2 - They've been caught replacing affiliate links with their own.

Based on that information what does your instinct tell you?

Point #2 is false.

Brave partnered with a few crypto exchanges. The issue (which is on GitHub) was a bug in the URL auto suggestion feature of the chromium browser. Instead of suggesting the links, it was replacing them ONLY ON THOSE 2-3 CRYPTO WEBSITES.

The bug was fixed before it became news. It was fixed on day 1 of the report.

Your defense was to mention that they were tied up in crypto?

Maybe it's just me, but it really devalues a product when there is a crypto association.

That's a bias, then. If what the person you're responding to says is correct, being associated with crypto would seem to have nothing to do with it. I have no idea if it's correct, but it sounds like it could just as easily have happened with any kind of partnership.

Desperate attempt to confuse the issue. Brave introduced a "bug" that if no one noticed would generate large amounts of money for Brave and would have eventually spread like affiliate links on tech news sites. They tried for a money grab, got caught, and called it a bug.

You're so gullible.

How do people keep peddling #2, when it isn't even factually correct on what happened? Sure, presume malice on the campaign links to Binance, but the bug was about turning people writing binance.us IN THE ADDRESS BAR into a campaign link, not replacing anyone's affiliate links on web pages, which is how it's always presented as.

Brave does not block native ads (except for Google’s) on any website. All third party embedded ads are blocked by default.

So it blocks Google search ads, but not brave search ads?

No, it doesn't block Google's sponsored ads. It blocks embedded ads that track you.

Yes, Brave will block via Aggressive mode in Shields.

Brave is shilled by so many tech "influencers" on Youtube you would assume it's a decent browser. These are privacy focused people. People that promote and use Linux daily and they're using a browser that is one step away from Google. What a joke.

Are these paid promotions? Youtube influencers shill so many dubious sponsored products in general they've become very easy to ignore since one can assume it's all trash.

Short list of other YouTube trash I'm never touching:

* OperaGX

* NordVPN

* SurfShark

* RidgeWallet

* BetterHelp

* And the granddaddy of all trash sponsorships - Raid: Shadow Legends

All of the VPN shillers/advertizers on youtube should arguably be demonetized/banned for spreading 100% false information.

* Vercel

* Planet Scale

* Supabase

* Neon

* ...

Linus did a good overview of Brave.

https://youtu.be/YnSv8ylLfPw?t=135

Coincidentally I’ve noticed a significant drop in quality of results, even though I don’t see any ads yet. It is well known that relevance and click through rate (CTR) are inversely correlated. Was the deterioration in relevance “prep work” for ads?

Advertising is not the problem. The current ad system is to blame. A different ad model is needed. One that is built using privacy, choice and rewards. User data and activity is not collected. Users have the choice to engage or ignore. And, if they choose to engage, they are compensated. Money flows directly from the seller to the buyer. We built this solution and call it Sellff Offers. It’s an alternative model that works the opposite of AdTech. Although just launched, we think Sellff Offers is the future of digital advertising. https://sellff.com/offers

I disagree. I abhor advertising primarily because it non-consensually and obnoxiously competes for my attention. (the privacy thing is also bad of course)

Brave search has been so terrible for me. I’ve very quickly been conditioned to append “!g” to all omnibar searches, even in non-brave browsers! (This tells brave to use Google)

I'm the only one wondering why that should be a (good) news?

I mean: are the user rewarded for the attention (the logic behind BAT) or it's just another search engine with another search ads ?

Mine is an honest question, not a complaining.

An indenpendent search engine that doesn't track you seems like a good thing to me. Remember, half the nastiness of modern ads is that they track you and are also pretty heavy. In a search engine it's much easier to get the targeting from your search query without tracking you - something eg. DuckDuckGo also does. Helps keep the lights on.

Been using Brave Android since 2017, have never used BAT or whatever "value-add" bloatware they've offered. It can be disabled from the menu, two taps max.

This is great news. I hope they will be able to beat Google in Ad game. Customers have spoken, they need ads, they want ads and they love ads.

I mean thats the reason all streaming service are now pushing ads after years claiming the ad-free viewing is superior experience. They are admitting to the fact people love 30 min show end up in one hour because of ads.

Adding additional ads is future I am looking forward to.

American capitalism is structured such that the disrupters that are anointed to take on the incumbent monopolist are all just temporarily embarrassed monopolists themselves.

So, Brave is now tossed onto the enshitification pile?

Recommended replacement?

I really am hoping that Orion is a thing that works out.

Firefox.

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