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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#421

Post by smoldesu »

mapgrep wrote: post #417
smoldesu wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place . Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.

Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads! I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be priva…

> Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options.

If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.

Re: Brave Search beta

#422

Post by jonathansampson »

smoldesu wrote: post #414
jonathansampson wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers (which are known to be dangerous) on behalf of its users (the same users who were installing uBlock Origin in Chrome and Firefox before coming to Brave). This is a security and privacy necessity on the Web today. Users are then able to opt-in, if they like, to a novel advertising platform within the Brave ecosystem. These users can earn rewards for th…

We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place . Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.

We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models:

1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution.

and

2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls frequency caps), and gives everybody (not just the wealthy or well-off) a way to support content creators.

And you feel the second one is the "disturbing" model?

Re: Brave Search beta

#423

Post by surround »

x4e wrote: post #383
surround wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark (#!) at the beginning of a script. 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 #

Note the (Unix) part of the Wikipedia URL. This is an entirely different context.

So in which context does "shebang" refer to a ! without a # ? I can't find any definition like that online.

Re: Brave Search beta

#424

Post by jonathansampson »

smoldesu wrote: post #421
mapgrep wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads! I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be priva…

> Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.

I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google.

On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance.

Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.

Re: Brave Search beta

#425

Post by smoldesu »

jonathansampson wrote: post #422
smoldesu wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place . Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.

We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models: 1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution. and 2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls f…

As much as I know you want to chime in here, I'm not going to play any games where you draw the goalposts. My current options are the following:

1. I can continue to use Vivaldi and uBlock origin as a completely open-source and so far flawless combo

or

2. Go out of my way to switch to a browser with dubious privacy claims, a goddamn personal cryptocurrency and (the cherry on top) a developer who spent the better half of his afternoon tracking me down and asking me why I don't like their browser.

I think I'm good.

Re: Brave Search beta

#426

Post by cturtle »

r-w wrote: post #375
cturtle wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Brave Search supports !bangs ;)

That’s good to know!

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.

Re: Brave Search beta

#427

Post by jonathansampson »

xpe wrote: post #279
jonathansampson wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave Search supports the Fallback Mixing option, as well as shebangs (e.g. !g, !a, !b, !d, !e, !yt).

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 sea…

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, ". I'll try to refer to them simply as bangs (or perhaps something like search/filter bangs) from now on

Re: Brave Search beta

#428

Post by nh2 »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #263
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

> Is 95% really not acceptable?

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.

Re: Brave Search beta

#429

Post by throwitaway1235 »

jtdev wrote: post #143
nmx- wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have other sources than breitbart?

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/15/google-tweaks-its-algorithm-...

They all know Google search employs censorship, they just rather lie to your face.

I almost forgot about the blacklist! https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is...

Re: Brave Search beta

#430

Post by jonathansampson »

howolduis wrote: post #419
jonathansampson wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not accurate. Brave offered affiliate link options to users who were searching for particular terms (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png ). These were presented to users as a way of optionally supporting Brave development. Our mistake was matching fully-qualified URLs too (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image2-1.png ). When we were made aware of this, w…

you work for Brave. I can't take what you say on face value

Please don't take my words for granted. Verify everything. If you wish to prod a little, I'm always happy to chat :-)
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