Viewing profile — solso

Hi Vladimir! Good to see we are in sync. Glad to see Kagi doing well as well. For the record, when I said "long before Kagi was even announced to the public." I meant exactly what …

Disclaimer: Works at Brave, before at Tailcat. Goggles white-paper was released more than a year ago, long before Kagi was even announced to the public. Additionally, before Brave …

An active choice is better than a passive one, if only because it requires an effort, in that respect the explicitness is an advantage over the typical personalization. The article…

Mojeek is one of the very few players that are building their own index, my respects.

There is plenty of comments discussing on the provenance of DDG results, including from Gabriel himself, which is the one we both have participated in, "it is misleading to say our…

This is Josep M. Pujol from Brave Search. I'd like to correct some factually incorrect information regarding Brave Search. Brave search crawls the web through the Web Discovery Pro…

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 resu…

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 me…

It is trivial to de-anonymize if records are linkable, which is the case you mention on Dark Data DEFCON25. Another famous case was the de-anonymization of the Netflix data set. Ho…

The chosen excerpt omits the fact that it is predicated on the HumanWeb. In the technical papers above there is a more precise description on what and how was collected. There was …

Mozilla never did such a thing. The browsing history was never sent in any shape or form. As the journalistic article you quote states, Mozilla put in place the HumanWeb[1,2,3], wh…

There was no tracking on Cliqz, nor it will be any in Brave. To know more about the underlying tech of Cliqz there are interesting posts at https://0x65.dev , some of them covering…

You are missing the entire point, "search" is sadly about advertising, not about the search itself :-) Bing is interested serving DDG, Qwant, Ecosia and a lot of other unknown sear…

>> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy > This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it …

There were no problems in 2017 or before, we were doing the same exactly the same during Firefox times (we went through security and privacy audits). Data collection is and always …

This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Thanks for noticing it, we will create…

Brave is based on Chrome, whereas Cliqz is based on Firefox (just to be precise). Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on …

Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them. Sorry to hear that the quality was not go…

Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot …

Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, …

No, I would not call it a shame, and I think that no-one should either. In fact, what DDG does is admirable IMHO. First, they do not hide that they aggregate. It's fanboys that ten…

You can check for yourself, Bing seems to the the user agent... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22my+user+agent%22&t=h_&ia=web

I think that if Google was prevented (somehow) to pay for user acquisition that would actually be enough to allow competition in. They use billions each year to acquire users, even…

That's not a problem per se, it's just unlikely to happen because of the insane amount of the bill, and the roi is not that good anyway. For instance, Google pays Apple 9 billion/y…

When the monopoly is strong as Google is, with market shares around 90%, and they use 20-30% of their revenue for 'user acquisition' (they pay to be default in any platforms: from …