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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#261

Post by unicornporn »

mrpf1ster wrote: post #63
zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 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 f…

DuckDuckGo allows you to do a Google search by prepending "!g" to any query. So usually I do that for the last 5% of queries that DDG fails on.

Or you could just use https://startpage.com/ and get Google quality results 100% of the time.

Re: Brave Search beta

#262

Post by CallMeMarc »

jonathansampson wrote: post #127
open-paren wrote: post #119

I think they copied DuckDuckGo's bangs. It's nowhere in the documentation, and the UI never indicates it, but bang searches (like `!stackoverflow parse html with regex`) work in Brave Search exactly as they do in DuckDuckGo. Preliminary testing of mine suggests that they just copied DuckDuckGo's list directly–I tried a few obscure ones from DDG, like `!ldss` or `!uib`, and they work in Brave Search. @w0ts0n any detai…

We support many shebangs, with more to come in the future. For now, this is what is offered: !i - Search Images !n - Search News !a - Amazon !b - Bing !d - DuckDuckGo !e - eBay !g - Google !p - Pinterest !r - Reddit !s - StartPage !w - Wikipedia !li - LinkedIn !gh - GitHub !gm - Google Maps !so - Stack Overflow !tw - Twitter !yt - YouTube !wa - Wolfram Alpha !mj - Mojeek !osm - Open Street Map !mdn - Mozilla Develope…

Are the !a and !e bangs for Amazon and eBay defaulting to .com and if yes, is there a way to get them to default to e.g. amazon.de?

Re: Brave Search beta

#263

Post by lowkeyokay »

zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 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 f…

> 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

Re: Brave Search beta

#264

Post by kbelder »

azinman2 wrote: post #217

I find it very interesting that Eich was outsted from Mozilla for his anti-gay stance, and much of HN was in agreement at the time, yet this seems to never come up with Brave despite LGBTQ rights having far stronger support today. Why is that?

The 'anti-gay' stance was that he donated to a campaign for prop 8 in California; that preposition passed. So he was guilty of agreeing with the majority of voters in California.

It's not that odious of a sin (and I disagree with Eich, incidentally). Should the majority of California citizens be canceled, permanently? Not allowed any leadership positions?

Re: Brave Search beta

#265

Post by meibo »

jonathansampson wrote: post #245
threatofrain wrote: post #207

How does Brave plan to handle relations with law enforcement and their requests? Will Brave offer a mechanism to uniquely identify the most offensive users?

Not sure what you're referring to here; Brave doesn't have any user data. We don't collect it to begin with. We believe in Can't be Evil over Don't be Evil .

Yet, you have no way to prove it - or is this product completely open source?

Additionally, I believe OP was referring to requests for removal of search results that contain personal information. Both Google and Bing support these and will remove results in accordance with GDPR.

Re: Brave Search beta

#266

Post by azinman2 »

kbelder wrote: post #264
azinman2 wrote: post #217

I find it very interesting that Eich was outsted from Mozilla for his anti-gay stance, and much of HN was in agreement at the time, yet this seems to never come up with Brave despite LGBTQ rights having far stronger support today. Why is that?

The 'anti-gay' stance was that he donated to a campaign for prop 8 in California; that preposition passed. So he was guilty of agreeing with the majority of voters in California. It's not that odious of a sin (and I disagree with Eich, incidentally). Should the majority of California citizens be canceled, permanently? Not allowed any leadership positions?

I'm not trying to re-litigate the past. But it was enough of a consequential donation back then to have removed from as CEO of Mozilla. So that's a pretty big deal. Somehow that has never made its way into anything related to Brave as far as I've noticed, and generally I've followed the company at least in terms of top HN links (always curious to see what people are doing in the browser space). I've never seen it mentioned in any articles discussing Brave, or in any of the HN commentary since. I just find that odd, especially against the bigger societal winds. I'm wondering if I'm missing something like he himself did some about-face, or people lost track of this, or if they just don't care anymore or what? But not only did Mozilla care back then, but quite a bit of HN did as well when it happened.

Re: Brave Search beta

#267

Post by threatofrain »

meibo wrote: post #265
jonathansampson wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're referring to here; Brave doesn't have any user data. We don't collect it to begin with. We believe in Can't be Evil over Don't be Evil .

Yet, you have no way to prove it - or is this product completely open source? Additionally, I believe OP was referring to requests for removal of search results that contain personal information. Both Google and Bing support these and will remove results in accordance with GDPR.

I'm really just asking for those who search up "criminal" content, as I remember Google being asked to give up the IP addresses of those who searched under a term in a specific region at a specific time -- but that still meant thousands of addresses.

But I think your case is also worth adding to the conversation, although I don't believe removing results collides with privacy.

Re: Brave Search beta

#268

Post by gabrielsroka »

evdoks wrote: post #84
open-paren wrote: post #11

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.

Check this recent podcast with Brave‘s founder, where, among other things, he is talking about how the search is implemented: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/modern-finance/id13386...

Non-Apple link

https://www.modern.finance/brave-browser/

Re: Brave Search beta

#269

Post by opheliate »

jonathansampson wrote: post #67
yellow_lead wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 creato…

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.

Re: Brave Search beta

#270

Post by ec109685 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #191
lopatin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, why are you opposed to search ads? They are already targeted by your search query, so don't fundamentally rely on tracking data.

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…

Google only charges users once per user per click.
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