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Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

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Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#391

Post by robertlagrant »

leroy-is-here wrote: post #389
lmm wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.) That's utterly backwards IME. On Booking.com, most modifications are the push of a button (that, crucially, is right there in the UI that I already kn…

Do you have a vested interest in Booking.com? Interesting that you vehemently defend a common negative experience that booking through third parties is garbage, but you only seem to be defending this particular website.

Probably because that's a website they think is good at this. I don't think we need the pitchforks quite yet.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#392

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

josephcsible wrote: post #320
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #190

Would be nice if Brave did not require SNI since this is considered a privacy concern by some folks.^1 Anyone sniffing the wire can see all the domain names to which the SNI user is connecting.^3 The other search engines do not require SNI, e.g., Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, GigaBlast, Qwant, etc. 1. One example would be Cloudflare. Because some folks see SNI as a privacy concern, Cloudflare used to offer ESNI which was…

If you can choose not to require SNI, doesn't that mean that your domain is the only one being served by the IP it's on, and that the IP address (also visible to anyone sniffing the wire) then reveals the exact same information as SNI would have?

Not necessarily. For example, if I access 142.250.187.228 what domain name was in the Host header. Hint: It's not www.google.com. If I visit 65.9.141.10, then what domain was in the Host header. Hint: It's not search.brave.com.

But do not take a random HN commenter's word for it. Try this yourself. Try to map IP addresses to domain names on a very large sample. I have tested this on hundreds of thousands of domains. It will not work reliably. Not even close. Compared to SNI, which is both simple and reliable, it is a total PITA.

If this 1-to-1 IP to domain mapping and 100% reliable reverse DNS idea made any sense, then why claim encrypted DNS offers "DNS privacy". Anyone can see IP addresses on the wire. If all IP addresses can easily be mapped to domain names, then how would this provide any privacy.

Mapping IP addresses to domain names has to account for the fact that IP addresses can change. To make sure the mapping is correct one has to constantly keep doing lookups. SNI stays the same even if the IP changes. It requires very little effort; it makes the process of determining the domain name trivial.

The goal is not total privacy. (Impossible when using the internet anyway.) The goal is to not to make surveillance easy. That's what SNI does. It makes surveillance (and censorship) super easy.

If I am wrong about this, and SNI is AOK, then why was ESNi developed and why is ECH being developed. It is not an easy problem to solve. Why bother. SNI was a feature to benefit websites, not website users. It has some very undesirable properties for users.

Even with CDNs that need to use SNI, it is still possible to avoid sending the domain name in plaintext on the wire. One can use a dummy name, i.e., not the name in the Host header, as the SNI and the CDN can still return the correct page because it uses only the Host header. This was nicknamed "domain fronting". I was using this technique before anyone started calling it that. Using a dummy name can reduce the surveillance value of SNI, sometimes to zero. After some "security researchers" started bragging about their discovery of "domain fronting", AWS and other CDNs started checking SNI against Host header to make sure they are the same. Now "domain fronting" no longer works. Countries that censor the internet, who are valued AWS customers, rely on accurate SNI in order to carry out censorship. Go figure.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#393

Post by lotsofpulp »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #205
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to do this for years and ultimately been disappointed. Even on my latest hotel booking, the direct quote was 20% more than Expedia and that's not an isolated incident. I suspect this is partly predatory pricing on behalf of Expedia (charge the hotel 30%, discount the price 20%, get all the bookings and take the difference.) Yet I really can't justify spending the extra $400 to stand the moral high ground.…

A few times Ive literally used an aggregator booking site at the lobby desk after asking to stay longer, and the hotels price is higher than online. I've assumed they do this as a combination of lazy tax plus they don't want to undercut aggregators as these might stop showing them if they know people will go direct to the hotel after searching.

Refusing to accept more money is just bad hotel management or ownership not aligning incentives properly.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#394

Post by Yizahi »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #381
lmm wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.) That's utterly backwards IME. On Booking.com, most modifications are the push of a button (that, crucially, is right there in the UI that I already kn…

"On a boutique hotel website, maybe I'll get a phone number that I have to look up the international dialing code for and then call in that country's business hours, if their website isn't just completely broken." If call them on the phone that implies one can speak the language. If hotel has a website that suggests it has an email address. Not sure I would want to stay at a hotel with a broken website and no email a…

Nobody replies on the emails nowadays. You are lucky if the mobile number mentioned matches with Telegram, Whatsapp or whatever else, or it's phone call only. I'm talking about small to medium businesses - shops, hotels, restaurants etc.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#396

Post by soundnote »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #330
somenameforme wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crypto stuff is opt-in only, including on mobile. If you accidentally enabled it, you can disable it by clicking on the settings icon and going to 'Brave Rewards' and turning off 'Brave Private Ads.'

This comment was completely incongruous with my previous Brave experiences, so I went ahead and did a fresh install on a clean system. * The wallet is enabled by default. * The new tab page shows crypto ads by default. I couldn't figure out how to opt-out of these despite a couple of minutes in the "customize dashboard" menu. I know the option exists, but it's well-hidden. * The BAT rewards icon is enabled by default…

> * The new tab page shows crypto ads by default. I couldn't figure out how to opt-out of these despite a couple of minutes in the "customize dashboard" menu. I know the option exists, but it's well-hidden.

Customize->Background image. Has a total of two switches. One for background images at all, the other for sponsored background images. Turn the second one off.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#397

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Yizahi wrote: post #394
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"On a boutique hotel website, maybe I'll get a phone number that I have to look up the international dialing code for and then call in that country's business hours, if their website isn't just completely broken." If call them on the phone that implies one can speak the language. If hotel has a website that suggests it has an email address. Not sure I would want to stay at a hotel with a broken website and no email a…

Nobody replies on the emails nowadays. You are lucky if the mobile number mentioned matches with Telegram, Whatsapp or whatever else, or it's phone call only. I'm talking about small to medium businesses - shops, hotels, restaurants etc.

"Nobody..."

That's quite broad. How about some specific examples.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#398

Post by somethingreen »

poszlem wrote: post #125
lisasays wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean in not caving to conservative-friendly "free speech" preferences? Its decision to downrank state-sponsored disinformation? One can question the wisdom of these decisions - but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship.

> but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship. So is all censorship. No censor calls censorship "Censorship". An example from my country of birth: Main Office of Control over the Press, Publications and Performances, since 1981 the Main Office of Control over Publications and Performances - the central office of state censorship in the Polish People's Republic. It was a censorship body (analogou…

The benefits of censoring misinformation are obvious if you think about it for even a couple minutes.

If you run a community tech support forum and someone starts suggesting deletion of windows32 directory as a solution to other users issues, do you let them do that?

If some neighbor in your bbq party claims to be a doctor and goes on a rant about benefits of microdosing rat poison, do you invite them ever again?

Do you disable spam filter in your mail?

We now have malicious misinformation multiplied to internet scale by modern tech. Add LLMs in the mix and we will drown in it if no measures are taken.

You want to prevent politicians or corporations from abusing or even using censorship at all - good, implement corresponding barriers. Limit scope to clear factual misinfo and not e.g. opinions - yes, sure. Proper transparent process, recourse, rehabilitation, grace of application, oversight - absolutely, implement all of those things.

Make censorship good. Denying it is required makes no sense.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#399

Post by soundnote »

k__ wrote: post #120

Interesting timing. Just today, it told me to use Bing or Google for image search. I understand the reasoning, but it felt a bit like "whelp, we give up"

API costs, I guess. Brave's image results were served from Bing previously.

Re: Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

#400

Post by soundnote »

riskycodes wrote: post #146
brianbreslin wrote: post #145

How does Brave monetize this? How do they monetize their app in general? Is there a ppc ad platform they're offering?

Yeah, but you opt in, and you receive a share of it (in their altcoin) if you do.

Different thing. That's their Brave Rewards thing, which shows you ads (your choice how often) as toaster popups and gets you a part of the revenue as BAT (which can be used to support creators with Brave's tipping service).

The search engine itself shows keyword based ads on search results pages, and Brave offers a $3/mo subscription for ad-free search.

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