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Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google

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Re: Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google

#41

Post by mikepurvis »

ehsankia wrote: post #31
mikepurvis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know if DDG passes through every query on demand, or does it have a caching layer or something where popular queries only hit Microsoft once a day?

Does it matter? If it's proxied through a single API "user", Microsoft can't track individual DDG users, right?

I think it still matters— maybe it's way harder to track an individual user, but you could still do some inference about queries which lead to other queries, or watching for bursts/crescendos of traffic on a particular topic in response to current events.

Re: Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google

#42

Post by ehsankia »

mikepurvis wrote: post #41
ehsankia wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? If it's proxied through a single API "user", Microsoft can't track individual DDG users, right?

I think it still matters— maybe it's way harder to track an individual user, but you could still do some inference about queries which lead to other queries, or watching for bursts/crescendos of traffic on a particular topic in response to current events.

Your first claim, I'm suspicious this can be done after a certain scale. If DDG is sending queries from millions of users, it's much harder to untangle them.

Your second query, absolutely, Microsoft is getting very good aggregated data from their API, which is useful to them, but that's not really a privacy violation for individual users.

Re: Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google

#43

Post by mikepurvis »

ehsankia wrote: post #42
mikepurvis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it still matters— maybe it's way harder to track an individual user, but you could still do some inference about queries which lead to other queries, or watching for bursts/crescendos of traffic on a particular topic in response to current events.

Your first claim, I'm suspicious this can be done after a certain scale. If DDG is sending queries from millions of users, it's much harder to untangle them. Your second query, absolutely, Microsoft is getting very good aggregated data from their API, which is useful to them, but that's not really a privacy violation for individual users.

Yeah, that's fair— once the queries are anonymized and stripped of any locale information, there isn't too much more to go on. And while there may be technical reasons to want to cache popular searches, then you're mostly just denying your upstream analytics which are fairly reasonable for them to want to have.

OTOH, Debian deliberately provides the technical means for third parties to host verifiable mirrors of their package repository, and then makes the analytics an opt-in thing (popcon).

Re: Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google

#44

Post by WalterSear »

elnygren wrote: post #5

Current title "Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google" seems quite misleading since there are plenty of private alternatives to Google (search engine) already ? Especially for english speaking programming and news etc. searches, https://duckduckgo.com is really good.

Fwiw, over the many years of trying it, I have never experienced Duck Duck Go search results to be anything but unusably poor quality unless I specify the google search engine, which, IMHO, is quixotic.

Re: Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google

#45

Post by tlackemann »

fc373745 wrote: post #30
tlackemann wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the decisions of Brave. I recently uninstalled the browser on my phone when it kept prompting me to enable crypto wallets and other things I don't care about. I just want a better alternative to Chrome. Brave's obsession with crypto will be the death of them.

I've never had such an issue. The only way I am able to avoid youtube ads on mobile is by using brave browser. Also i'm very sure all the nuisances you describe can be disabled.

They can be disabled and have been, multiple times.

Each upgrade enables some new wallet on my homescreen or advertises some new coin exchange site (disabled both several times). One day, Twitter was randomly polluted with a "Tip" button next to each Tweet, it took me awhile to find how to disable that.

A real shame too, I did enjoy using Brave for the short couple of months I did use it but their constant upgrades that reenable crypto are just plain annoying.

Once again, Brave's obsession with crypto will be the death of them.

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