I'd be really shocked if it didn't tie to BAT in the Brave Browser, but I am definitely curious what they'll do for people who use it with other browsers.
They say it's their own index. That's amazing if true (I wouldn't put it past them to lie). It's super fast and the results (formatting, snippets, etc) look a lot like Google.
What reason would we have to lie? Thank you for the kind words and support otherwise Please do let us know if there is ever anything we can do for you.
I imagine they will utilize the Basic Attention Token for search ads, in a similar fashion to the rest of their advertising.
From the page:
---
> Will I see Brave ads in Brave Search beta? What about Brave Rewards?
> We’re currently thinking through different search experiences to offer our users. Some want a premium, ad-free search experience. Others want a free, ad-supported model. We think choice is best. Brave Ads with rewards is definitely possible, once we’re ready to take on the challenge of privacy-protected search ads.
Right, their current browser ads seem to promise privacy by doing some floc-like thing on-device and preloading a bunch of ads to potentially show so the server doesn't know which ones were shown.
Doing that for a website seems a bit different, but I don't see an issue with the DDG model of doing some very basic targeting based only on the current search term.
I believe that in the address bar you should get an icon to set the current site as a search provider when you're on it. On Firefox it's in the more menu at the right end of the bar.
I search to ask if brave built their own index. Relevant results up top, then I’m getting CNN article about Fox’s right word shift, and all kinds of other completely unrelated items. Incidentally they all were interesting sounding (clickbait) and I found myself reaching these unrelated articles. It was a bit like browsing Reddit, except this is a search engine and I had a very specific yes/no question.
More privacy-oriented search is a good thing, I think.
I’d like more details on what they mean by private.
I do like that they have a metric for what’s independent vs personalized and I think that will help reduce the “I did Google it and my top result conflicts with what you told me” type frustrations, https://search.brave.com/help/independence
"Even supposedly “neutral” or “private” search engines rely on big tech for results. Brave is different. We deliver results based on our own built-from-scratch index. We’re beholden to no one."
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?
I guess you can get 90% of the way, but the remaining 10% becomes really hard unless you're Google scale. But even several 90% alternatives would be better than absolute monopoly.
Do not forget that Brave (the browser) was designed/marketed as part of the US Culture Wars, basically as a Firefox-but-for-Conservatives.
Brave (the search engine) apparently follows the same strategy. The reason for having this index is basically political. Brave doesn't want to be impacted by Google or Bing's editorial choices. Of course, Brave Search will certainly be doing its own editorial choices.
Brave is just a browser. It exists to empower the user, regardless of their personal politics. On "editorial choices," we've proposed Goggles, which you can read more about at https://brave.com/goggles.
I think it is definitely a hard problem to solve on a large scale to address latency, quality and size of the index they plan to address. It definitely isn't as easy as spinning up an elastic search cluster.
I agree that getting something "mostly" good or a domain specific search engine isn't as hard with the newest advances in this space with vector similarity indices.
There are tons of hurdles. For example, many major websites will block you if you are not a crawler owned by a few companies. They have to be in Google’s index to survive, but that doesn’t mean they allow everyone else to copy their content.
Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index, it will then get it from Google or Bing.
I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.
Presumably the fallback happens server side, and presumably the google/bing queries are cloaked so your IP isn't making it to google/bing.
Curious why you wouldn't use bing/google even if your queries are "proxied" through Brave servers? (Assuming Brave isn't also sending your IP, etc, when they submit the query to google/bing)
You're referring to Fallback Mixing, which is off by default. You have to enable it in https://search.brave.com/settings. When enabled, this feature will (at times) pull in results from Google via an anonymous query, routed through the browser. Read more about it here: https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback
> Note that choosing this option has no effect on your privacy. If you happen to have a Google account, Google will not be able to associate your query with this account.
I'm confused about "routed through the browser" -- is the browser talking to Google directly, but without sending the login cookies, and then hoping Google doesn't associate searches from your IP with your identity?
Correct, a query is issued from your browser but without any cookies. While it's true your IP address tags along for the ride, the IP address isn't typically how users are tracked on Google-scale properties. Due to NAT and more, your IP address is not exclusively yours. It can represent many people at once, and over time. That said, if you are not comfortable with the idea of Fallback Mixing, you do not need to enable the feature.
Well.. it kinda isnt. If your IP would be private you CANNOT use the internet. You just cant. If you use a VPN, you share your IP with the VPN. So you ALWAYS have to share your IP with someone for anything you do on the internet. So it cant be private.. it just cant.
There are 2 things u can do, either use a VPN and only share your IP with them, but then brave will also use your vpn when sending info to google, so your IP is safe in this case..
Or option 2 is that you watch out for the things u make connection to. Which is literally impossible. Visit any popular website and your IP gets sent all over place in the background, mostly towards CDNs or analytic platforms. But yeah, the brave feature is an opt-in.. so u kinda give your consent there.
IP addresses are not exclussive to the internet, they also exist within local networks at home or office etc, people refer to your IP address when using the internet as your "Public IP address".
That being said, it's not nice when people are spreading around your IP address. It's much the same as people sharing your home address. Companies should indeed not be allowed to just give this information away to other companies. But brave isnt doing this, as long it's an opt-in it's your own choice.
They aren't sharing it with Brave directly, but rather with users. The query is issued via the participating user's Brave instance. This data then supplements what Brave Search has found, and assists Brave Search in presenting better results to that user, and others, in the future.
It's still a request from the user; the user consents to issuing these requests on behalf of Brave Search when they opt-in to Fallback Mixing. Anybody can issue calls to Google's search engine.
This has not been my experience. Comparing results with Google, Startpage, and a Searx instance with only Google enabled reveals that the results are almost always from Google. Sometimes they merge multiple results that share a domain.
Brave Search doesn't fall-back to Google; not unless you have enabled Fallback Mixing in https://search.brave.com/settings/. Brave Search has its own index; the results may resemble those of other engines at times, but they aren't pulled from those engines (again, noting the exception of Fallback Mixing, an optional feature offered to the user via Settings).
I'm testing on Firefox and the Tor browser right now, JS disabled. I also disabled cookies in Firefox. Searches for "Seirdy", "Neovim", "gccgo", and others return results identical to Google, Startpage, and Searx instances with only Google enabled. No other independent engine of all the 25 other English independently-indexing engines I compared in the article has had this happen; identical pages on all the other engines are nearly impossible to find for advanced/uncommon queries.
90% of queries being identical to Google but different from the 25 other independent engines is one hell of a coincidence.
As a counterexample, I searched for something very obscure (only three pages on startpage) expecting to see them pulling in results from startpage to cover the long tail. I was surprised to see different results, suggesting their index is much larger than I assumed.
The query was "retail snap incentive program"
Edit: All your queries are for relatively popular terms. I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right top set of pages.
> 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.
Mixing with Google results only can happen after opt-in and only in Brave browser. You can see if a single query has been mixed clicking on the `Info`, or check the independence metrics on the `Settings` tab.
The fact that you see results similar to Google for popular queries is a by-product of the fact that our ranking is trained using anonymous query-log. There is plenty of references to the methodology (https://0x65.dev/).
The fact that we are similar to Google on certain types of queries, is good (at from the perspective of human assessment). It's easy to find other types of queries for which we are not similar to Google. It would be rather stupid if we were to "use google" on easy to solve queries but not on the complicated ones, don’t you think? In any case, very nice article besides a couple of miss-conceptions (like this one), will bookmark.
Disclaimer: work at Brave search, used to work at Cliqz
That makes a bit more sense; I just read the blog posts. I'm concerned about the effects of optimizing against Google (namely, the extremely similar results); I don't think I understand the point of an alternative if it tries to replicate a competitor to this degree. The whole idea I was going for in that article was a diversity of information sources: if one engine isn't giving the results you want, try another.
Right now, users who want Google results and privacy can use a Searx instance or Startpage.
You bring a very good point on the diversity of information sources, which is something we plan to attack in the near future with open ranking [0]
In my opinion having similar results to Google will facilitate adoption. After all, Google is pretty good for many types of queries (not all), and people in general have strong habits.
The fact that we are similar with our own index is great. It means that we have the power of deviating from it when needed, as we mature/evolve.
Allow me to repurposed your statement on why not use startpage if you want Google-like results: if tomorrow Google disappears (or for some reason becomes unusable), brave search will continue to operate as normal (similar to old Google). What will happen to searx or startpage? What till happen to ddg or swisscows if the provider turning bad is Microsoft. IMHO, no matter how much reranking or nice features they you put on top, unless you do not control the search results themselves, diversity can only be superficial.
Sorry for the "rant". Thanks a lot for the inputs and for updating the doc, appreciate it.
Interesting. I couldn't reproduce those results. Certain queries did produce _very_ identical results, but others did not. In some of those cases Google and Startpage did better.
It does not appear that they are exposing all possible settings configs on mobile as fallback mixing is not shown as an option for me there. This seems like an oversight to me.
Because you cannot issue a cross-site request to Google from the client due to CORS policies. This feature required work in the Brave browser itself, so that the application would serve as a pipeline for the request on behalf of the search page itself.
I don't see a fallback mixing option on that page. Is it called 'Fallback Mixing' on that settings page? Also, these results are pulled from google and bing it seems for every query I do. seems like maybe some reranking is happening. And the query completions are from Bing. So you are sending everybody's queries to third parties. Not very private.
Indeed, we lean heavily on Bing for image search. With time and maturation, this will change I'm sure. That said, when Bing lacked "tank man" results recently, Brave Search still yielded results (although the quality wasn't what we'd like to see; still a beta product. Screenshots here: https://twitter.com/BraveSampson/status/1400926207416410113). Crawl, walk, run. We're just getting started
So, note that Brave brought in the Cliqz/Tailcat team to build this: While it's a "new search engine", I'm guessing the data and algorithms they were working on previously have all made it into this project at some point. Cliqz launched in 2015, so there's a number of years of work put in.
In December '19 the company that would end up being acquired by Brave did a number of blog posts [0] where they explained the tech. The short answer is 'a lot of word2vec'.
Funny how their posts show such a different approach to their browser than Braves. E.g. forking Firefox not Chromium, implementing functionality as extension instead of in browser where possible...
> If all browsers end up using Blink (Google), the Web will suffer as developers will only optimize and test for the Blink rendering engine.
Am I the only one that thinks that this would be a good thing? Like the entire industry sharing the same core open source technology? Write a website once and it works perfectly across all platforms?
Chromium is nominally open source - in practice it's controlled by Google employees in any way that matters. So you would literally be handing full control over the web-experience to Google.
Nothing stops them but considering they've gone the route of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" after fighting for so long, I doubt they're likely to diverge significantly at this stage.
No monopoly or monoculture, even if open source, is good. It is not just about the features that you think makes your life better, you have also to consider the potential catastrophic bugs that could be exploited and leave everyone without an alternative.
Evolution only happens when there is divergence and competition.
> 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.
The problem there is that metric basically equates to math at the end of the day, I don't think those are directly comparable. It would be very strange (and new) to have one and only one implementation of an entire class of software, instead of a technical standard with multiple different implementations.
Well we're already effectively at monoculture. The only other rendering engine that has any meaningful market share is Apple's fork of Webkit.
I disagree that with the proposition that a single open source project with broad industry representation would hinder evolution.
Companies like Google and Microsoft don't compete on their ability to support the various web specs, but on quality of the web applications they can deliver to customers. Competition in this space will continue to drive innovation even with a single agreed upon rendering engine.
It would, however, limit the ability of a company like Apple to hobble their only-supported browser such that web apps can't compete with native ones.
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.
Those were the days! I was just explaining to my children yesterday how computer games were played in 640x480 when I was their age. I remember designing websites for that resolution too; still impresses me what we were able to do with so few pixels, lol.
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.
You surely are too young to remember the IE6 shithole monopoly we were all in when - MOZILLA - ALONE saved us.
It's not that having a common rendering engine for everyone would be bad. What's bad is having 1 company (or a few) for-profit companies controlling that rendering engine.
Depends mostly on the terms you choose to evaluate it. Certainly that is one upside, but the downsides are pretty clear as well. Chromium is an open-source base but it is still very much spearheaded and dragged by the whims of Google, and if there is no other game in town they have even less of a reason to avoid decision that might not be in the best interest of users.
Additionally, you lose even more meaningful competition that drives improvement. Obviously you don't lose it all as your different chromium flavors do implement different bells and whistles but those are much narrower in scope.
It continues to be ironic and concerning that Firefox exists at the whims of Google paying to be the default search, but in some ways that helps them with potential antitrust cases as well. I think we have a lot more to lose than gain if we fully collapse into a Blink/Chromium singularity.
Sounds like they built their index by collecting Google search queries done by the users of their browser extension. Suddenly Brave's "completely independent index" doesn't sound quite as impressive.
I’ve been using it. Seems like a solid search engine. Interestingly, Google appeared to be censoring results yesterday to hide reports about an unfortunate shooting at a Juneteenth event in Oakland and a subsequent situation where a crowd of people were blocking an ambulance from exiting the area of the shooting with wounded victims. Let’s just say the story didn’t play well to Google’s political base… so they hid it. Brave search provided unfiltered/uncensored results.
I'm wondering how this censoring process you envision actually played out at Google. Like did an executive tell an underling to hide this information from the world? I'm genuinely curious.
I’m also curious what Google’s “political base” is, since they’re apparently getting final say on the search results. I keep getting Pinterest on my image searches and maybe the political base can help.
Breitbart is not news, it's white nationalist facist garbage. If you think anything on that site is reliable, please go get educated. You providing "evidence" from there is embarrassing.
Hiding a news story like this specific example? No, I do not believe Google did that. Not for a second. That is absurd.
How they handle possible spammers, people posting dangerous medical advice, etc is a bit different, no? I'm not letting them off the hook entirely, but this example is simply ridiculous. What benefit would they get from it, and at what risk? (i.e. disgruntled employee blows the whistle on their behavior)
Do events show up on Google search that quickly, and in turn, get censored that quickly?
I saw the video of what you are referring to on Twitter. Just searched on Google, "alameda twerking", and the first four results I see are for this incident.
Well I'd be interested in hearing how Brave search was able to surface results faster than Google yesterday... YouTube (another Alphabet echo chamber) was/is also removing video of the ambulance incident, so it was definitely on the big tech thought police radar.
Seems quite fast, good UX overall. I like that it gives me information like "all results from Brave" so that if they do fall back I know about it.
DDG has a 'bang syntax' where I can do things like '!rust' to start searching the rust docs from my url - I like that a lot, I wonder if there's anything similar here or if I could work around that somehow.
Update: We do support !rust as well (and all of DDG's other bangs).
Brave Search supports many shebangs, but I don't believe we've added support for `!rust` yet (we do have `!mdn` and `!so` though). I'll submit a request to add a `!rust` option too!
Shebang specifically refers to using an exclamation point to define where data should be directed. Same as it is in Bash scripts, just a different context and slightly different syntax.
Not true. In practice I've found their results to be basically identical to bing and other bing front-ends. What's not from bing are the widgets like weather, or dictionary definitions etc.
So imo, "many sources, bing is just one" is misleading, as the main SERPs are pretty much straight up bing.
(Note: I've used ddg as my main search engine for years)
They pretty clearly only talk about instant answers there.
When they say over 400 sources it even links to [0] a page about instant answers.
What do you expect? That I hack into ddg and give you their source? Try some searches for yourself and see that the results [1] are basically identical to bing [2] and other engines using bing[3], when compared to different indicies[4][5][6].
>They pretty clearly only talk about instant answers there.
You seem to be dismissing instant answers when in-fact those are exactly what the end-user expects; that's search results: Type in a query, get an answer. What am I missing here?
> 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.
Obviously they're saying (correctly) that the part that isn't true is the part where you said the search results aren't directly from bing. And by search results they clearly mean the list of links wherein you click on a link and go to a webpage that matches your query.
> 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 pretty clearly only talk about instant answers there.
They talk about both, "traditional links" are not instant answers: "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."
> Try some searches for yourself and see that the results are basically identical to bing
I disagree on your definition of "basically identical". Google and Bing results (in a private window) are more similar to me than DDG and Google:
Do side by side comparisons. I haven't seen any of my searches (admittedly only the few I checked for this) differ from Bing's results in results or result positioning
It's unfortunate really as the owner guy keeps saying they use multiple sources but in all of my tests.. they're all Bing. I don't care about using Bing, I do care about being deceived (slippery slope, thin end of the wedge, etc etc)
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.
Do a few more tests, especially complex queries, you will see a pattern emerges. In my tests, It is definitely using the Bing index (not necessarily same ranking / filtering algorithms or the same version of the index)
The BAT (and before it, Bitcoin) is there as an optional feature. It's not on or enabled by default. It's there for users who wish to anonymously earn rewards for their attention, and use those rewards to support content creators on the Web.
...except those "rewards" don't ever reach the creators pockets, unless they're savvy enough to make their own ERC wallet and go through the collection process.
"If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. [...] At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators."
The only issue you have left with BAT is user education, got it.
So thankfully the tech is solid. Now just UX polishing and onboarding.
Personally, I think you're just being obtuse and looking for a problem.
-- edit --
@dang, go fuck yourself, seriously.
Until this edit I haven't said anything offensive. I've simply been a contrarian for many topics: technical, social, political, agricultural, philosophical. It seems you don't want a Socrates? Too bad.
I can't help you allow these topics and other commenters post their opinions and I have opposing opinions. I'm always as respectful as the person I'm responding to is.
I also don't bring the topics up in the first place, yet you target my response for bring a flamewar? Why not the post I was responding to with the opposing opinion?
How is "got it" more offensive than "Case in point." How is pointing out GP's actions offensive? Care to point out exactly what you found so offensive?
Again, go fuck yourself. You know what you're doing.
Censorship isn't cool. Your Marxist, CCP dick-sucking side won't win.
Go let China bend you and YCombinator over some more.
That's offensive, true but offensive, until now I haven't posted anything offensive.
[This post describes the behavior of Brave Payments in last 2018. It is not an accurate description for how the system works today, in 2021].
No, creators did not have to be savvy enough to make their own ERC-20 wallet. We worked with Uphold at the time. Creators could verify with Uphold (a wallet would be created for them), and we would then send Brave's BAT (earmarked for the creator by Brave users) from our own settlement wallet over to the creator.
I have a few websites and receive payments from Brave Rewards almost every month. They pay me in BAT, but since I don't care about BAT or can use it directly, it gets converted to my local currency, which I then can use to pay for stuff.
It's a mistake to assume something is nonsense or bad just because crypto is involved. Provided that you can convert it to something usable, it doesn't really matter if you're paid in dollars, BAT or something else.
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.
Depends are which side of the table you’re sitting at.
I like Brave and many other people do. Just look at any of the other HN posts about Brave.
Since I like Brave, from this side of the table it looks like the anti-Brave people come out in full force to try to spew the same old crap and badmouth Brave. At the point it is the tired old crap, which most has been debunked already.
With the referral program and integration with a cryptocurrency, anyone can shill for it. It's hard if not impossible to know if someone promoting Brave has a stake in BAT or not.
Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth") don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn people.
That’s a romantic view. There’s folks on HN working for direct competitors of brave. I doubt that everyone defending brave is a shill, or that everyone criticizing it does so with the purest intent as you’re suggesting.
The only real competitors for Brave are other cryptocurrencies, which yes there are many. I feel there's plenty of reasons to not like Brave and few if any are about suggesting a superior cryptocurrency.
The only non-compromised Brave users I've come across are mobile, and they are the ones that find using the Firefox add-ons menu to install uBlock origin too complicated. They are unlikely to learn the BAT system.
There is hardly a significant website out there with a higher concentration of Google and Microsoft employees than Hackernews, in light of which that's quite the baffling comment to make.
I happen to like that counterpoint. It doesn't feel like damage control, it feels like what they're doing, is worthy of discussion and they don't shy away from it.
Seriously. For a privacy focused org to have these moral failings makes me skeptical they won't abuse users' trust in the future. I still don't think it's right to accept donations on behalf of someone you have no prior agreement with.
That's a misleading way to frame it; Brave distributed BAT tokens to its users at the time (this was in 2018). We then asked those users to give (or "mark") those tokens to their favorite content creators. Some gave them to verified creators (who were shown with a check-mark, similar to Twitter), while others gave them to unverified creators (who had no distinguishing marks, similar again to Twitter). When the creator was unverified, the BAT (which Brave gave to the user) was deposited into a settlement wallet, waiting to be claimed (similar to how PayPal lets you email money to others). Needless to say, there were may naive UI/UX components in the product and process, and the community feedback that we acted upon (quickly, within a couple days) was phenomenal. Read more at https://brave.com/rewards-update/.
I disagree with you that it's a misleading way to frame your company's actions. Even if users all knew that the creators had no relationship with Brave, the company was still accepting donations on their behalf, which is what the parent comment said.
And to be clear, I'm highly doubtful that the users were all aware that there was no relationship there. Framing the distinction as being between "verified" and "unverified" creators is disingenuous IMO: On any other platform, creators being "unverified" would mean they'd signed up, but just hadn't confirmed some details yet. The comparison of the check-marks to Twitter is also very strange, Twitter's own UI would prime users to think that a check-mark signified a notable user, not just any user who'd signed up. Whereas Brave's "unverified" users have no relationship to the company whatsoever.
Perhaps this was all just naivete on the part of Brave, but it's very concerning to me that a company which (presumably) intends to become the de-facto method of monetising content could possibly be so naive as to how their actions would be perceived.
When comparing to twitter you fail to mention two large differences:
1. You don't donate to people via twitter.
2. The people on twitter actually signed up for twitter.
If you actually think it was a mistake then perhaps stop defending it. If you don't think it was a mistake then stop explaining away to controversy by saying it was "naive UI/UX".
I'm defending the model, but not that particular iteration of the UI/UX. People weren't donating their own money at the time either; they were effectively telling Brave who they'd like to support. Brave would then take Brave's BAT tokens (which we set aside for this purpose), and marked them for that creator (we would then engage in outreach efforts).
Didn't even realize the extent of the referral codes. Imagine if Chrome auto-inserted their own amazon affiliate links when people typed in Amazon.com - people would be up in arms.
Why would people be in arms? Seems like a perfectly fine thing to do. They are literally referring people with buy intent to amazon's deep product pages.
I've since clarified my comment, I meant if Chrome inserted affiliate links, not Google (search).
For chrome doing it, the same applies to Brave as those people would have visited binance.us regardless of if Brave inserted their referral code link there.
It's traffic attribution; Brave showed the affiliate option to users via a pre-search UI panel in the browser (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png). Users could then decide to use the top suggested result, or not. The mistake here was matching on fully-qualified URLs, as opposed to search-input exclusively (the intended behavior). You can read more about it here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. No element of this is malicious.
As for what others do, traffic attribution is common. Open Firefox and perform a search from the address bar. Long before you press Enter, Firefox has already sent keystrokes off to Google.com (assuming you haven't changed your default search engine), along with a tag on the URL identifying Firefox as the source of the traffic.
The problem is that referral programs are intended to get people who wouldn't have signed up for a site to use it, and for binance that means getting people not already signed up to sign up and trade crypto on binance.us. This includes the referer getting up to 40% of trading fees[0]. Even for the example where a user chooses between the search 'binance' and `binance.us/?ref=`, in both cases they were already planning to visit and/or sign up for the crypto trading site, Brave didn't do any referring themselves. The profit sharing aspect makes it far-removed from the notion of just being for traffic attribution.
If you read the post covering the feature in Brave, and reviewed the screenshots of its implementation, you'd see that the intent here was to respond to user input, and offer the user the option of using Brave's referral link. The intent was never to coerce users into using the link; it was merely presented as an option—a clean and clear way to support Brave development.
It is still an example of traffic attribution, as is the case with Firefox sending your keystrokes to Google asynchronously (marked with the Firefox identifier). This is how Firefox continues to get paid, by sending users over to the Google search engine. In the case of Brave, this identifier was shown to the user prior to any network activity. That isn't the case with Firefox (and nearly every other popular browser).
If binance is fine with it then sure, but it's not like Binance is getting any extra sign-ups thanks to Brave from these suggestions, they're just giving up a percentage of their trading fees when it happens (the user would have signed up regardless of if you allowed them to use the optional referral code or not).
You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; that isn't the case. Brave is designed in every way to preclude abuse from the design stage, and with a Can't Be Evil mindset, as opposed to the Don't Be Evil of Google. If you have questions about Brave, or Brave Search, we're always happy to chat.
> You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong;
They're not saying Brave did anything intentionally wrong, they're just big enough mistakes that it's not possible for them, personally, to trust the organization.
> those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization
> 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.
I appreciate the response! I stand by what I said, but I do appreciate you adding your perspective and sharing links so that others can read what Brave as an organization has to say about these incidents.
To be clear, I only mentioned 'data' generically and not 'user data' specifically. Its clear that Brave Ads collects data, even if you don't consider that data to be user data.
Correct. Data is collected. We detail that data and the privacy-preserving process by which it is collected at https://www.brave.com/p3a/. When you consider the type of data collected, it's clear why Brave is still identified as the "most private" browser among leading options: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. Everything we do is designed for user-privacy and security, first and foremost. No amount of data is worth breaking your trust.
Lex Fridman interviewed Brendan Eich earlier this year (a real gem of an interview, in my opinion).
I found all of it interesting, but here's a timecode link where they begin to discuss the current era of "browser wars", technical aspects and history of privacy protections, ads, search, and how that's all related.
I use Brave on android and I was able to set it. I think you have to do a search (or possibly go to settings on the site? I forget) and THEN follow the steps to add it. I thought there was an issue for a while but then I managed to get it set just fine.
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.
Personally I find it pretty predictable which queries duck duck go will fail on. Basically very niche ones.
So I just prepend based on what I'm searching for to begin with instead of after a failure. But I've also been using duckduckgo as my default for over a decade so I've gotten used to it.
I'm amazed that DDG/Brave don't understand that typing something immediately after a "!" on a smartphone is annoying and difficult. DDG only supports "!" after the character for a small subset of bangs. Thankfully "g!" is one of them, but it's immensely easier to type on smartphone.
You can use !g on Brave Search too, or turn on Fallback Mixing in Brave Search Settings, which will anonymously call out to Google and pull in results as needed. This helps to train the nascent engine more rapidly. I hope this helps!
> Violating a website's ToS is hardly illegal, though.
Can you be more specific as to your claim? Not illegal in what sense(s)? And what is your basis for the claim?
I'm not a lawyer, but saying "violating a website's ToS is hardly illegal" is fraught advice.
While individuals may get some leeway when it comes to ToS violations (see [1] and [2]), I would expect companies scraping and/or extracting content would be treated differently.
robots.txt is not a legal contract. It's just a convention to express the wishes of the site author, but there's no legal obligation to follow these wishes.
It does indicate that those other sites want Google to scrape them, while Google does not want others to scrape their results, which is an important distinction ocdtrekkie ignored for whether the scrapee will want to take legal action.
While scraping search results isn't illegal, by any means, it's also not illegal for Google or Microsoft to block requests they believe are from competing search engines. Presumably the cost of paying them is less than the cost of hiring engineers to constantly try to find new ways to outwit Google and Microsoft engineers.
Again, if scraping data from websites without permission, Google simply wouldn't exist. Bear in mind, robots.txt is a feature that Google and Microsoft choose to respect, but the default assumption search engines have made from the beginning, is that they are free to grab whatever they want from the web, unless you ask them otherwise to please not.
> 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.
> 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.
Why would they be? Again, if all things being copyrightable by default, Google could not even exist, they assume they have the right to consume any data they want.
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.
All things are copyrighted by default. Once again, those websites grant a license to search engines to consume their content via robots.txt, and Google does not.
It's not scraping static text in order to point you to those sites, it's using the features of the site to perform a service better than you can do yourself. It's completely different.
If I made a site that claimed to help you with your math homework and simply sent the queries to WolframAlpha, that would also not just be "scraping."
Google has donated many millions to the Wikimedia Foundation, basically in payment for this.
(But, again, there's a difference between scraping and echoing a request on another site and waiting for its response. The latter is basically unauthorized use of its API, not scraping.)
Yes, the Fallback Mixing requires the Brave browser, since it pipes the request through the participating user's machine (only if the user has first opted-in to the feature).
This is incorrect. Fallback-Mixing, if you have enabled it (which requires Brave), issues an anonymous query to Google, lacking any cookies or other persistent state for that domain. These results are then presented along with Brave Search's own results. There's no tracking involved. If you perform a direct Google search, you're passing along your cookies as well.
that's also 100% reliant on google though. what would happen if that became a lot more popular than it is now? would google try to sabotage it in any way?
i would rather support and spread the word about search engines that don't rely solely on google
>
that's also 100% reliant on google though. what would happen if that became a lot more popular than it is now? would google try to sabotage it in any way?
No, but it does mean that you are likely to use it without knowing when they do start tracking you. Because of course an adtech company will (and of course they will deny until the day they change it).
They are called bangs, not shebangs. A shebang is #!
> In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark (#!) at the beginning of a script. It is also called sha-bang,[1][2] hashbang,[3][4] pound-bang,[5][6] or hash-pling.[7] - Wikipedia
> Bangs are shortcuts that quickly take you to search results on other sites. For example, when you know you want to search on another site like Wikipedia or Amazon, our bangs get you there fastest. A search for !w filter bubble will take you directly to Wikipedia. -DDG
Thank you for the correction. I used to call them hash-bangs (not sure where I picked up that habit in my ~25 years of industry experience), until I started seeing more people refer to them as shebangs. Oddly enough, while reading them out I would always say "bang, <identifier>". I'll try to refer to them simply as bangs (or perhaps something like search/filter bangs) from now on
Quite obvious, but naming things is funny in the web-development world. We still call any asynchronous retrieval of data "AJAX," even though it rarely, if ever, involves XML :-)
Honestly, ads clearly marked as ads and contained just to the results page would be fine.
But in the race for better ad performance, they introduced tracking & retargeting & profile building while at the same time both minimizing the visual difference between ads & organic as well as nearly pushing organic of the first page.
Search ads have become visually almost indistinguishable from legitimate search results on most search engines, including DuckDuckGo. That's why I try to avoid them whenever possible. DuckDuckGo allows you to turn them off completely.
IMHO search ads are bad search results, and in 99% of time they are not something I would want to click. So they are doing nothing useful but only adding friction to my search experience. I am not against privacy friendly ads in free services, but if there's an option to pay to get rid of ads, I will pay.
I'm in eCommerce, run ads (on eBay, not Google) and would have to agree 100%.
The only products we put paid promotion on are common and overpriced, and the demographic of the customers is very different to what we'd find through our products sold through organic search.
Based solely on anecdata through the messages we receive and the addresses we ship to, the people who click on ads are somewhat more likely to be lower-socio, much more likely to have low literacy skills, and a couple of orders of magnitude more likely (not an exaggeration) to live in a remote Aboriginal community.
It feels somewhat dirty/exploitative, but it's what the customer wants. They have the choice of saving $50+ by scrolling past the first 3-4 results, but they choose not to. I just don't understand.
Since they're nearly indistinguishable from real organic search results, people click on them assuming the search engine found them the best result. This leads to two major problems:
1. Search ads are the primary source of malware and fraud on the Internet today. (Phishing emails are second.) Sites pretend to be other sites all the time, and to allow tracking and landing page behaviors, every major search ad provider allows ads to "lie" about the destination domain. So you may see an Amazon ad, it says it goes to Amazon.com, but actually directs through to realamazonlinkipromise.biz instead. Fraud's really profitable, so fraudsters win ad slots easily, and are adtech companies' best customers, so there's really little incentive to crack down on this.
2. Search ads use this placement as a form of extortion. If you run, say, Best Buy, you shouldn't have to buy search ads for "best buy", because obviously you're the best result. However, they have to, because if they don't, the search engine will sell ads to their competitors using their keyword, so people searching "best buy" get "Circuit City" as the top result instead. (Yes, I chose that reference in part because I don't want to shame any real current companies in this example for sleezy practices.) And since users click the top result (the ad), not the first organic result, Best Buy ends up paying for every click for every user who goes through Google/Bing/etc. to get to Best Buy.
The second reason is why browsers are so obsessed with combining the search and address bars: They want you to search "best buy" or "bestbuy" or etc. because that's ad revenue, whereas actually typing bestbuy.com nets Google nothing.
> every major search ad provider allows ads to "lie" about the destination domain.
This seems like the real problem, not search ads as a concept
> So you may see an Amazon ad, it says it goes to Amazon.com, but actually directs through to realamazonlinkipromise.biz
Just disallow that? Problem solved.
If you want yet another filter, only allow public companies or companies that have raised >10M on Crunchbase to advertise, and have them verify that they are really who they are by asking them to put some string of your choosing in their DNS records.
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.
> 2. Search ads use this placement as a form of extortion. If you run, say, Best Buy, you shouldn't have to buy search ads for "best buy", because obviously you're the best result. However, they have to, because if they don't, the search engine will sell ads to their competitors using their keyword, so people searching "best buy" get "Circuit City" as the top result instead. (Yes, I chose that reference in part because I don't want to shame any real current companies in this example for sleezy practices.) And since users click the top result (the ad), not the first organic result, Best Buy ends up paying for every click for every user who goes through Google/Bing/etc. to get to Best Buy.
One thing to note is that the cost of the ad is based on the landing page relevance (and even more so for branded terms), and so in your example Best Buy would be able to buy the ad for the "Best Buy" keyword for pennies (a rounding error on their SEM campaign, I'm sure), while Circuit City would have to pay a whole bunch for the "Best Buy" keyword.
Given that, I don't mind it so much. It's a good way for a competitor to get their name out there, but it's not really a sustainable practice long term for them. There's built-in pressure favoring the incumbent on their own terms.
Bear in mind, Best Buy should pay zero pennies for each of the millions of people trying to reach their website. It's absolutely inexcusable for a search company, which also owns an ad company, and also happens to run the web browser everyone's using, to create a system that basically taxes all attempts to visit a business's website specifically.
Honestly, what Google and Microsoft and such are doing in this case is trademark theft. They are selling the search result for a trademarked name they don't own, and when the actual trademark owner wants to be found by their own name... they have to pay for it.
I don't know who is going to file the case, but sooner or later, someone should, because it's a slam dunk.
I can't answer him, but there is a peace of mind not having ads talk (is not the right word) to you, even absent everything else. As in I can actually set my attention to something and finish a coherent whole without having to give any attention to ads.
I didn't realize this until I installed Sponsorblock which got rid of the last ads I was seeing there. Suddenly I could focus on whatever they were creating and the video was talking about without having my attention diverted to something else.
Maybe that is just me, but that is why I now mind ads.
Future post: "We have listened to our users, and we are removing ad-free paid search due to a lack of demand and [some excuses about how it's technically difficult to maintain it]."
We'll see which comes first. That post, or "Our Great Journey."
Same excitement here. I'd love to see anyone(Brave or others) chip away at my Google dependencies, even if they charge me for them. I already love Brave as a browser, so here's hoping search pans out.
I don't mind a company profiling me. A lot of Google's cross interacting products work great(Gmail to Calendar and Maps, for example). I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my data. A guy can dream...
> 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.
The issue is that you're not describing a sustainable business model. Sure, it would be a much better situation than we have now, but you can't cover hosting fees with data bills.
That's a strange argument. "If we pay you for the product you give us, we'll never be able to pay our service providers. Instead, we'll give sell it to someone else."
Brave isn't capturing user data, and the "replacement" topic requires more nuanced coverage. Internet users have been installing ad-and-content blockers long before Brave (when Netscape launched the Plugin API back in 1996 or so, ad-blockers began to appear almost immediately).
Brave is rescuing the Web from a block-alone response, which starves content creators of much-needed support. Brave also increases the potential for support by giving users without disposable income (and those with disposable income) the ability to support those who make the Web enjoyable. We do this in a manner which is low-friction, and anonymous too (thanks to the Basic Attention Token).
Brave has introduced a model that understands the security and privacy reasons for blocking third-party ads and trackers. But Brave doesn't stop there (as is the case with popular blockers); it also aims to address the issue of content sustainability online.
> I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my data.
You can get pretty close to that by buying YT Premium [if you watch YouTube] and using an adblocker everywhere else, and this gives Google the non-ad-based monetary incentive to profile your viewing habits to show you more videos it thinks you'll like without optimizing for Ads.
> I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up changing the default search engine back to Google.
Hmm...
> Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page.
That's also what DDG does. If you don't like DDG, odds you'll like some even smaller effort are quite to zero.
Tracking isn't a necessary component of a subscription service. You can have a model with premium features and/or offerings which doesn't harvest user data, such as searches and more.
> I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand.
Is 95% really not acceptable?My experience is quite different though. When I don’t get the results I hoped I just use !g. Easy. But the result are rarely any better
> 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.
I used to do this, but at some point I just stopped. Google is not better than DDG. More SEO spam and much more hostile UX.
Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX too so I don’t have any big hopes for this. I like the idea of paying for a search engine, though. I would seriously consider that if DDG offered it.
Upvoted, but here is the reason why I don't use it, some people haven't yet fully realized that Internet doesn't have borders:
> We will be in touch when we are ready to release Neeva in your country. Thank you for being part of the Neeva team, we are so excited to build the future of search with you.
I’m using Neeva. I like the team and the idea, but at least for me there is a drastic drop off in search quality from google. It is pretty far from 95% as good.
Can you elaborate on how you feel "Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX"? You're not talking about the first version of the User Tipping feature from 2018 (where Brave gave BAT to its users and asked them to give mark which creator(s) they'd like to support) are you?
Generally the same type of problems as a lot of UX has today, especially on mobile: various messages and modals and controls that seem to be motivated by Brave’s needs, not mine. Sponsored images, trying to get me to set it as standard browser, “Brave rewards” whatever that is being a permanent part of the UI and turning itself on without me asking it to.
These might be small things compared to Google, but I’ve never experienced that DuckDuckGo did anything like it, so my trust in them is higher.
Let me expand a little on why I think this is so corrosive to my trust in Brave, because this is interesting stuff. When I use the Brave browser, I have to second-guess everything in the UI to consider why a control or message is there, if it’s in my interest or if you’re trying to get me to do something that’s in your interest. My eyes have to scan the UI in much the same way I do with ads in search results or spam in my inbox; having to actively filter out the potential harms from the things that are useful.
It’s like I can feel my eyes getting more tense as I do this.
That means that every single time I use the browser, the impression that Brave should not be trusted is reinforced in a very physical way. It’s not just a “brand impression” but a muscle memory.
What missteps? The only notable UX issue we've had was years ago, and was a matter of naïve design. When we were made aware of the issue, it was corrected within 48 hours. Hard to portray that as a "culture of hostile UX".
Maybe you could start by listening instead of accosting every comment that you find. Your incessant reply-bombing is childish and unprofessional, nobody wants to engage with someone who defends a browser like it's their sole lifeline.
Furthermore, you don't get to choose what your "UX issues" are. "UX" quite literally stands for "users experience", which is on the other side of the spectrum from "developer experience". As a dev myself, I know it's difficult not to conflate the two, but acting like issues straight up don't exist is blatantly hostile.
I have no personal qualms against Brave. I'm just another developer who wants a browser, and Brave's naive featureset doesn't appeal to me: that's fine. I'm just helping other, similar users make the right choice.
I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate, I'll post a response.
Regarding user experience, I'm not just a developer of Brave, but I'm a user also ;-) Not only that, but I spend a lot of time speaking with users all across the Web, so as to understand how they're using Brave, what works, and what doesn't. I do feel uniquely qualified to talk about matter of UX when it comes to Brave.
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.
Since you seem to know it all I'll just leave you be. My only actionable advice is that you should hire someone nicer to handle public relations, lest you bleed users from your own mouth.
From my read through the thread, you're being very nice, but also very dismissive. That's not actually respectful, even if it's not the harsh things you describe. And it's not kind. If you disagree with someone's experience that you feel passionately about defending, you might have better luck defending it by taking a moment to think about what they experienced differently from your own experience, how much you care about that different experience, and how you might incorporate that into future action. Not everything needs public relations, and it can definitely feel uncaring if it's mostly public explainings.
People who think it's disrespectful when a company representative do not preface every response with "I deeply apologize that you feel this way" or some equivalent nonsense. You even claim responding to something inaccurate is user hostile.
Or they can just tell them facts instead of pretending to care what a random hater thinks. Just like they did. They also asked what bad UX they referred to, so they did what you wanted but it was still disrespectful apparently. If genuine feedback was met with "go fuck yourself" we could maybe call it user hostility but this was not.
I feel like pretending to listen, which is what he is doing, is worse than saying "go fuck yourself" because then it would be honest. I find it bizarre you find his feedback genuine, as to me it's the same thing as "go fuck yourself" but neatly wrapped up in a "I pretend to care what you say" format.
If he came straight out and said "I don't care about your opinion and here's why" I would respect him. Instead he just talks over the people he's pretending to listen to.
His job should be to solicit feedback, not dictate it. And if he's going to dictate it I wish he would at least be upfront about it.
You put it better than I could have before I got back to this. It doesn’t really count as “asking” if you’re preemptively dismissing the answer in the same comment.
I don’t use Brave but I think these guys are being unfair. Your comments are generally fine because they’ve prompted responses with detail, which I as a third party prefer.
“Brave is full of UX issues” <<< “Brave allows withdrawing BAT to only a single wallet provider”.
Okay, the latter comment is way more useful to me, a lay follower than the former. And it only happens because you pushed.
> I'm responding to users. You happen to have numerous comments here which aren't entirely accurate or fair, so I have responded to you a few times. Don't take it personal; if you publish something I feel is inaccurate, I'll post a response.
I’m not posting this in fight mode, I sincerely hope it will help: this is user hostile.
You’re responding but you’re not listening. You’re certainly not asking. How could you be sure you know what the other people you interact with think if you feel uniquely qualified to talk about users’ experience and just brush by people who don’t feel supported in their own experience?
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.
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.
Yea, but I mean who would want to cash out their pennies earned anyways. Only businesses/creators should be cashing out and they would need to KYC for any normal donations. Users should be just donating their pennies to creators and websites, which doesn’t take any KYC.
It isn't acceptable, no. I tried Duck Search (aka Bing) for a couple weeks and in the beginning I wouldn't know that I wasn't getting the results I was looking for and eventually realized that the results just sucked compared to Google.
I found myself having to second guess the results and then did a Duck / Google hybrid for a while, going to Google when I didn't get what I was looking for and eventually it was too much friction. I equate it with when I used to use two different text editors, one for speed (Sublime) and another (IntelliJ)for step-debugging because Sublime didn't have that part well implemented and it was just maddening to have to switch back and forth all the time and learn/maintain two sets of keyboard shortcuts etc.
Along these lines I use ddg’s bangs for the same benefit. So many searches for Python help are filled with very shallow intros on tutorial sites of varying quality with the official docs rarely the first result.
Now I just prefix my query with !py and I’m immediately taken to the docs.
Indeed, including nearly all of DDG's !bangs :) We also add in some others, such as !so for StackOverflow, !gh for GitHub, and !mdn for the Mozilla Developer Network.
Arrow and PgUp/Dn keys scroll the page, as per standard Web UI. Tab key jumps from one link to the next, also as per standard Web UI. Maybe they changed that between our comments.
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.
also: considering how far out in the long tail of search terms my query is, before choosing to go with the !g bang out of the gate.
Google I find is still better for topics that are more idiosyncratic. But the bang syntax makes DDG a natural choice as default because many times I'll want to go directly to a specific domain search, e.g. !r or !nyt
For me it's random technical dumb stuff, like library version compatibility.
Or a specific syntax I know exist but I can't figure out.
Now when I don't find what I need, I double check with g! ... once every 2 or 3 times, google do find what I'm vaguely remember exist and is out there.
Is never actual content, it's when I look for a specific one liner to copy paste and DDG do not deliver.
Honestly the main reason I ended up abandoning DDG is because you can't see the publish date on search results.
I know it's a fairly minor feature and one manipulated often by some websites, but I've still found it massively increases my chances of picking a relevant and up to date result. I didn't even realise how much I used it until I found myself getting extremely frustrated about its absence in DDG.
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.
I think before you spend days of work on something DDG can't find, taking a few seconds to add !g and check Google's results would be sensible. Usually when I try that, though, Google isn't any better.
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.)
I sometimes wonder if that 5% is something DDG and others can realistically solve. Perhaps the issue has less to do with engineering and more to do with Google being the dominant player over the previous 20-years (give or take). That's an awfully long time for one company to effectively own a product category and build expectations among users about how it should work.
FWIW I do get good results from DDG (sometimes better than Google) but that does require me to be a bit more thoughtful with my queries.
While I think there's merits to what you are saying, also keep in mind that Google SERPs have dramatically changed over the past few years. It's very much a different search engine to Google of the 2010s.
The most visible examples are that Google is editorialising specific results, and specifically boosting what it considers "credible sources". It also means wilfully not giving you what you want to search for.
Try to search for "8kun" on Google, and you won't find a single link to 8kun.
Try to search for "8kun" on Bing, and the #1 result is 8kun.top.
I am on the third or forth trial to change to DDG and this time it is working not because DDG is better but because Google's search is degrading so much.
> Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results
Why are we OK with these free services literally stealing Google results? Could you imagine the backlash if it was discovered that Google was doing the same for its results by stealing from DDG or another, smaller player?
Google is a Search Engine. Further, it displays content from sites directly in its results. This includes recipes, show times, sporting event details, and more. It has been argued that Google is stealing this data from smaller sites. Brave is (optionally, if you enable the feature) merely using Google (a more mature apparatus) as a means of learning to deliver better results to the user. The only way somebody is going to "build a better Google" is by training their data on what makes Google so popular to begin with. Brave is able to do this is a secure and private manner.
So Google taking data from sites and putting it on theirs is "stealing" but Brave doing that is different and Brave taking results from Google is considered "learning" or "training"? Hmm... I'm beginning to think people just hate Google because it's "cool" to have a negative opinion about it here.
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.
I've stuck with DDG for about the past year and a half and I have to agree. I want it to be good, but when debugging some obscure problem (like trying to learn SwiftUI lately) Google is able to dig up more result. Of course the "there were not results for <your error message> so displaying results for 'computer programming instead'" is frustrating so I preemtively add quotes around every term more frequently.
Lately I've noticed a weird problem with DDG where it will load a blank page of results. The page header with logo and search bar is there, but the white part of the page that has results never loads. Even after refreshing multiple times it's the same, but trying a different query fixes it.
If Brave can manage to produce higher quality results while weeding out SEO spam I will definitely subscribe.
> a weird problem with DDG where it will load a blank page of results
I've noticed the same problem too. My guess is that DDG pulls search results from 3rd-party engines such as Bing and for some technical issues it may fail from time to time.
For the other 5% of the time, use the !s bang for Startpage. Anonymized Google search results, with an option to visit the websites on the results page anonymously.
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
"If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine."
In 1998 when Google's founders announced their search engine they claimed it would be less commercial, more academic, more transparent and they would avoid the influence of advertising. Did things "go as planned." Not even close. What is the lesson here.
Meanwhile, every search submitted during the "beta" period is subject to none of those limitations.
"So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result is on the same page, or just one click away."
Brave is not the first to do that. Check out Gigablast, for example. If I am not mistaken, they also claim to use an "independent index". At least, they provide the source to a crawler and server.^1 That is what people should be excited about. Not Gigablast per se but the idea of an open source search engine that anyone can run. searx is another project worth looking at.^2
How many ways are results promoted and demoted; what are the factors used. Are these search engines that comenters are recommending in this thread transparent. (Making promises on a blog is not "transparency" IMO.) Where is the source code. What are the various server settings that alternatives like Google, DDG, Brave, Startpage, etc. never provide to users. This stuff should matter, yet the discussion of search engines always seems to devolve into personal usage anecdotes and "search shortcuts". Every user has different needs and preferences.
There are many knobs in web search that advertising-supporting tech companies providing "search engine" websites will never let users twiddle. The source code for those servers is not public.
1. To get an idea of type of settings users of popular search engines are not being allowed to control:
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?
I just tested the 47 servers listed in https://searx.space/data/instances.json. I did not use a browser. No Javascript, cookies, etc.. A good number of them worked fine.
Who knows what the people running those instances do with the search data they acquire.
What I like about searx though is the list of search engines it potentially targets. Comprehensive lists of search engines on the internet are always valuable. I see searx as a supply of "parts" with which one can make something of their own. I have made a metasearch utility for myself.
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
hi, gigablast creator, matt, here. thanks for mentioning gigablast. i've been coding web search engines for almost 25 years so it's always nice to see ppl recognize. i wish more ppl would care about these things. with enough people caring i think i (or we) could make gigablast into a super transparent, private search engine that doesn't rely on big tech like the other guys. really i just need more hardware at this point as that is the main technical hurdle for improving results quality and performance. if somebody would give me like $1M in amd-based minicomputers (i like minicomputers better than big servers - preferably asus) i think we could have something much better and faster, although what is there is pretty good -- this might be enough to really get things going.
in the distribution available on github.com, included are some static binaries for various open source programs. any reason that a static gb binary could not be distributed as well. with linux, i use musl so prefer static to ones linked against gblic.
Hey, Brave Search is currently hosted in the US (I am assuming you are on another country) and latencies will be bigger in other places. We will scale in the future, which should improve speed.
Startpage was turned into shit over the last few months. Requiring JS for search and absolutely freakish amount of ads dominating the first scroll of results.
Been with them for about a decade but this is too much
Startpage person here. In 2019, Startpage announced an investment by System1 through Privacy One Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of System1. It's 2021 and our privacy policy hasn't changed.
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...
I wish they would add a feature that would let you add your own tags to counterweight the lack of tracking.
Right now google knows a lot about you and uses it to refine the search results, if you remove tracking - quality drops. But if you at least let the user tell the engine that "I'm a programmer, gamer, geek, whatever" it might just do the trick to counterweight that.
Hey, we are planning on implementing something very similar to what you describe. You can read more about our proposal here: https://brave.com/goggles
In a nutshell, community-curated lists of rules to deeply change the way our core ranking algorithm surface content and influence the results you see for a given query.
DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite).
The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean that DDG's results can't be as good as G's, it just means you need to add that context yourself. Like if you search for a coding problem, add your computer language name to the search query. Or if you're search for a restaurant, add in your home town too.
I've found DDG's results to be comparable to Google's and in fact in the last ~3 years of exclusively using DDG, I can count on one hand the number of times I've tried searching for something in Google after a failed search in DDG.
Image searching is a little more hit and miss though. G's image search is better -- generally speaking. However DDG doesn't include Pinterest spam. So if you're after something specific using image searching, Google is better. But if you're after a general list of usable images, then DDG is better.
DDG also makes it very to download images, unlike Google that now makes you go though to whatever site and have to scroll around in the page to find the image
> but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling
I disagree. I've tried to switch to DDG several times too, and always go back to StartPage, which is a proxy for Google, and the results were always better even without profiling. There is a case to be made for Google having better results globally from aggregate user behaviour though.
I think googles crawler excels at crawling forums and social media like stack overflow or Reddit or support forums. The main thing I use google for is when I have a bug whose solution is 9 pages into some thread on some obscure discussion board I’ve never heard of
> Or if you're search for a restaurant, add in your home town too.
This definitely doesn't help in India. If you live in the US, Brave/DDG can probably serve you better local results. It's abysmal in India. Google local results in India are orders of magnitude better here.
I live in Europe so I'm definitely not talking from a US perspective. But I acknowledge that web services are generally worse in India than most (other) developed countries.
> DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite).
Per DDG's own help pages, they use mostly Bing and no Google. (The mixture of over 400 sources that they claim is used to provide the infobox-type results, which they call "Instant Answers", not the regular search results)
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
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.
The best thing about Google is that if you're on a website - say a travel website looking at hotels in Thailand - and then you Google "USD" it automatically completes "USD to Thai Baht" and then just gives you the answer very user friendly automatically. The same is true if you'd search "Best p" - you get "Best places to visit in Thailand" immediately, with a bunch of cards that are easy to read and use and get to more relevant things you're looking for.
Sure - this invades your privacy. But it leads to good results and a better experience.
You really don't want to give up your privacy in exchange for nothing. But this doesn't feel like the case here.
It's also just as good for location things. If I'm in different neighborhoods - I can type one letter in - and Google will pop up the right restaurant - and then in one or two clicks I can make an order.
This feels like a trade I can live with. I get it that a lot of people can't.
Considering that I use Google instead of DDG primarily because of how good the contextually aware results are for the things I most commonly search - sure.
A likely monetization by Brave will be prioritizing search results for verified content creators within the BAT token ecosystem (a la Twitter check-mark).
Is there a way to make this the default browser on iOS? I can see how to make it the default for searching in Brave but not system-wide. This matters for Siri-initiated searches.
The detractor below apparently fails to understand that searching for controversial topics is a great way to see which search engines are similar, or relying on the results from other engines.
This is one to look out for, I've been using this for about a week, and the search results have been really good, empirically they feel a bit better than DuckDuckGo.
If this stays this good over time and ends up having the same acceptable amount of text ads as DDG in order to be sustainable I might switch to it for good.
696 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 544 ms ] threadFrom 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.
---
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
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.
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.
https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/
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?
https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-...
There are 2 things u can do, either use a VPN and only share your IP with them, but then brave will also use your vpn when sending info to google, so your IP is safe in this case..
Or option 2 is that you watch out for the things u make connection to. Which is literally impossible. Visit any popular website and your IP gets sent all over place in the background, mostly towards CDNs or analytic platforms. But yeah, the brave feature is an opt-in.. so u kinda give your consent there.
IP addresses are not exclussive to the internet, they also exist within local networks at home or office etc, people refer to your IP address when using the internet as your "Public IP address".
That being said, it's not nice when people are spreading around your IP address. It's much the same as people sharing your home address. Companies should indeed not be allowed to just give this information away to other companies. But brave isnt doing this, as long it's an opt-in it's your own choice.
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?
[0] https://www.0x65.dev/
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://www.modern.finance/brave-browser/
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!
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
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].
[0] https://duck.co/ia
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monkey
[2] https://www.bing.com/search?q=monkey
[3] https://www.qwant.com/?q=monkey
[4] https://www.google.com/search?q=monkey
[5] https://search.brave.com/search?q=monkey
[6] https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=monkey
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...
3. https://www.monkey.cool
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey
5. https://pt.surveymonkey.com/
(change page)
6. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cool.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:
1. https://www.monkey.cool
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. [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted)
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.
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.
https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds
So thankfully the tech is solid. Now just UX polishing and onboarding.
Personally, I think you're just being obtuse and looking for a problem.
-- edit --
@dang, go fuck yourself, seriously.
Until this edit I haven't said anything offensive. I've simply been a contrarian for many topics: technical, social, political, agricultural, philosophical. It seems you don't want a Socrates? Too bad.
I can't help you allow these topics and other commenters post their opinions and I have opposing opinions. I'm always as respectful as the person I'm responding to is.
I also don't bring the topics up in the first place, yet you target my response for bring a flamewar? Why not the post I was responding to with the opposing opinion?
How is "got it" more offensive than "Case in point." How is pointing out GP's actions offensive? Care to point out exactly what you found so offensive?
Again, go fuck yourself. You know what you're doing.
Censorship isn't cool. Your Marxist, CCP dick-sucking side won't win.
Go let China bend you and YCombinator over some more.
That's offensive, true but offensive, until now I haven't posted anything offensive.
Great moderating job dumbfuck.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598433.
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?
I found all of it interesting, but here's a timecode link where they begin to discuss the current era of "browser wars", technical aspects and history of privacy protections, ads, search, and how that's all related.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE&t=7652s
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.
It seems it can be disabled in the settings (https://search.brave.com/settings) but it's opt-out rather than opt-in.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598042
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.
https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=swMo1sK5ntk
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.
Why the fuck is everyone sharing opinions here about Brave if they DON’T want Brave to hear and respond?
It disturbs your little perfect echo chamber?
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.
The most visible examples are that Google is editorialising specific results, and specifically boosting what it considers "credible sources". It also means wilfully not giving you what you want to search for.
Try to search for "8kun" on Google, and you won't find a single link to 8kun.
Try to search for "8kun" on Bing, and the #1 result is 8kun.top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598042
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
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).
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
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.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=lab+leak
https://www.google.com/search?q=lab+leak
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lab+leak
https://www.bing.com/search?q=lab+leak
I left it for the readers to form their own opinion. Something you apparently are loath to do.