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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#311

Post by throwaway292893 »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #310

Not that they’re required to do so and more choice can be good, but why didn’t they work with DDG? I see they’ve gone ahead and stolen the bangs (!w) feature for themselves.

DDG just uses Bing results. This solution is completely independent.

You may ask why that's needed, just recently DDG was censoring the "tank man" photo on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square because Bing was censoring it.

This new indexer is very much welcome and I hope it stays free of censorship from the CCP, marxists, and others.

Re: Brave Search beta

#312

Post by yepthatsreality »

throwaway292893 wrote: post #311
yepthatsreality wrote: post #310

Not that they’re required to do so and more choice can be good, but why didn’t they work with DDG? I see they’ve gone ahead and stolen the bangs (!w) feature for themselves.

DDG just uses Bing results. This solution is completely independent. You may ask why that's needed, just recently DDG was censoring the "tank man" photo on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square because Bing was censoring it. This new indexer is very much welcome and I hope it stays free of censorship from the CCP, marxists, and others.

Yes that much is clear, but DDG has a privacy bent to their engine too. It just seems like working with DDG to remove that fault would be beneficial to both parties.

If I recall, DDG chose to use Bing to remove Google from the equation but also prevent the need to reinvent the wheel.

Brave for all their technological progress and talk about improving the web, often seem to promote only themselves with their advancements. They aren’t required to share anything however. The parroting of bangs is just a bit hostile is all.

Re: Brave Search beta

#313

Post by tomstockmail »

AegirLeet wrote: post #31
tnorthcutt wrote: post #25

Reminder that Brave has done some morally questionable things in the past: 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.

It's a browser with built-in cryptocurrency nonsense. That should tell you everything you need to know.

That, and anytime there's a critical comment on hackernews their employee's come flying in to do damage control.

Re: Brave Search beta

#314

Post by aloisdg »

rglullis wrote: post #139
scoopertrooper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

Re: Brave Search beta

#315

Post by tonyspiff »

gnull wrote: post #103
zzyzxd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration I am talking about is: 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.

If you use Tridactyl, you can quickly jump to the search bar with “gi”. That's what I do.

you can easily create a command for it (and bind to key(s)):

  command ddgGoogleBang composite js (new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)).get('q') + ' !g' | urlmodify_js -q q | open

Re: Brave Search beta

#316

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

Zhyl wrote: post #37
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.

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'. [0] https://www.0x65.dev/

why is Brave calling them Tailcat? The company was Cliqz, not Tailcat.

Re: Brave Search beta

#317

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

ramesh1994 wrote: post #56
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would also highly recommend the blog post series [1] from Cliqz talking about the tech behind the search. [1] - https://0x65.dev/

I was involved with the cliqz search engine and used their browser for a while. Great people with excellent integrity.

Re: Brave Search beta

#318

Post by smsm42 »

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…

If DDG works in 95% cases, just use it and use !google command on it when it misses the mark.

Re: Brave Search beta

#319

Post by SamBam »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #182
JeremyBanks wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that legal?

Why wouldn't it be? Google scrapes the web to populate it's results, why wouldn't other search engines scrape the web as well? Google is a website.

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."

Re: Brave Search beta

#320

Post by throwaway292893 »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #312
throwaway292893 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG just uses Bing results. This solution is completely independent. You may ask why that's needed, just recently DDG was censoring the "tank man" photo on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square because Bing was censoring it. This new indexer is very much welcome and I hope it stays free of censorship from the CCP, marxists, and others.

Yes that much is clear, but DDG has a privacy bent to their engine too. It just seems like working with DDG to remove that fault would be beneficial to both parties. If I recall, DDG chose to use Bing to remove Google from the equation but also prevent the need to reinvent the wheel. Brave for all their technological progress and talk about improving the web, often seem to promote only themselves with their advanceme…

Bing and thus DDG's index really isn't that good.

Is Microsoft an underdog now? Why do you consider them any better than Google, especially after the "tank man" fiasco?

I don't see why it's a bad thing to make your own thing or to only promote your own company.

Brave isn't reinventing the wheel either, they purchased & revived Tailcats from Cliqz (https://0x65.dev/)

The bang operators are a small feature that are easy to implement, nothing special. Taking inspiration and features from competitors is nothing new.

Even in this thread there was a user asking for them, saying they'd switch over if Brave implements them (they already have them obviously)

I don't even think DDG came up with them first...

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