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Brave Search launches own image and video search

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Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#101

[flagged]

What does being "woke" or "based" mean when it comes to concrete issues you have using their products?

Mozilla the organization has done stuff like boot people for politics, published an essay that says "we need more than deplatforming" using as one of their examples organizations deciding what I should see on the Internet - preferring outlets that Mozilla themselves like, naturally.

They publish stuff with the gist of "did you encounter other politics on YouTube, how scary".

This one's more just a lack of product focus + pursuit of coolness, but the organization spends money on getting a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes for their browser and writes a pile of copy about how cool it is that a sneaker designer painted the browser blue - sorry, I can paint the browser blue to show that I'm an activist.

https://imgur.com/a/ZmUzr0q

> What does being "woke" or "based" mean when it comes to concrete issues you have using their products?

It doesn't necessarily have to reflect deeply on the product, just that the org itself feels the need to make its politics clear. Sometimes, it does show, like Mozilla being pro others shaping what I see in ways agreeable to them, which was the straw that broke the camel's back for me dropping them.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just thinking that if website publishers are able to legally allow Googlebot but block other bots, it might contribute to the Google monopoly.

That would be bad, and it is already bad that Google and Microsoft control so much of search queries, but the decision about which search engine indexes a website is purely the publisher's.

A publisher publishes. Once something is published, once something is public, the control a publisher has over the published thing is limited. For example, a publisher can not choose who reads a book after it is sold, who reads an article after it got printed. It is not a given at all that a publisher should have any say about being indexed. The search engine relies on a public fact - X wrote Y. That's legal (limitations apply).

The position of Brave of not accepting to be blacklisted if not all search engines are blacklisted is a pragmatic one. It works against Google's search monopoly, but still gives them some legal coverage since the robots.txt is not completely ignored, in case that indeed matters somewhere. I think it's an elegant approach well suited for the current state of the web, one that serves the greater good. And Brave, but that's completely fine.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#103
post #47

That makes two companies who both maintain their own Chromium forks and run direct competitors to core Google search products. I wonder if we'll see Google start to close off open development on Chrome - Microsoft will likely be fine, but that could put Brave in a precarious position.

I'm not sure if they can without rewriting the whole thing, the original (WebKit/KHTML) code base being GPL. On the other hand, the Google lawyers seem to have found an excuse to link some proprietary code into Chome (that's not part of Chromium). Does anybody know what that excuse is, and if it provides a loophole large enough to close off Chrome development?

They could pull a Red Hat.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#104
post #32
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" There's no way that's intentional. For starters, DuckDuckGo, Google and Brave image search all do the same thing here. Maybe it's some weirdness involving "american inventors" appearing in the phrase "african american inventors" or something.

Couple of google tests: “Black man” “Black family” Results as expected. “White man” “White family” A mixture of black and white. “happy black woman” Results as expected. “happy white woman” Lots of white women with black men. Edit: DDG’s results seems to fair better.

The last one might be because white woman might not be usually specified if she's not contrasted in some way to other races, since white is default in the anglosphere. So in those cases she's more likely just to be called "woman". It's "not ideal" but there you are.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#106
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be bad, and it is already bad that Google and Microsoft control so much of search queries, but the decision about which search engine indexes a website is purely the publisher's.

A publisher publishes. Once something is published, once something is public, the control a publisher has over the published thing is limited. For example, a publisher can not choose who reads a book after it is sold, who reads an article after it got printed. It is not a given at all that a publisher should have any say about being indexed. The search engine relies on a public fact - X wrote Y. That's legal (limitat…

A search engine index is an economic exchange between the website and the publisher.

To massively (over)simplify the argument to its essence (and ignore other important points): the publisher goes through the trouble and expense of creating the content The publisher then allows its content to be copied by a search engine only because being shown in search results gets it traffic back. The traffic it gets in return has value, and the publisher is happy for this arrangement to continue as long as the value of the traffic is more than the cost of producing and serving the content.

Brave offering a "license", for its own financial benefit, to "allow" others to use the content for LLM training gives zero benefit to the original publisher. This is why I use words like "sleazy" to describe Brave's position.

This argument applies to Google and Microsoft. Right now both are failing at citing sources in their generative AI search results. That is terrible and I hope it's fixed soon, as otherwise they're being sleazy scrapers as much as Brave is.

Finally, I wholeheartedly disagree they what Brave is doing is for the "greater good". The fact they charge extra for the "license" to use the content for LLM training shows that.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#107
post #34

As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search engines on the web: Baidu Bing Brave Google Yandex You can compare their results on this search comparison page I maintain: https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1 (If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and Pexels, click on "more engines" to select all places you want to search)

I accidentally found a good test string for image search a few months ago:

Bamboo sign

Give it a try on Google images. You'll see that nearly all the results are x-rays of people with ankylosing spondylitis, a form of which is commonly referred to as "bamboo spine".

I tested out brave search - it correctly shows 90% signs however it does also show a few spines.

Google still shows incorrect results months later. It's by far the worst of all the search engines in the list for this simple and obvious search.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#108
post #94

The major problem with Brave search is their position about indexing and licensing content against the wishes of the website publisher. Their robot does not identify itself, meaning the publisher cannot use the standard robots.txt to block its crawling if the publisher so wishes. Incidentally, the robots.txt file has been used in court cases litigating if a search engine is legal or not. Even worse, they state that B…

They are right and you are wrong. If some web page is publicly available, it should be indexed. Scraping neutrality, please.

What if I want what I publish to be known only by word of mouth?

What if I consider (some or any of) my ideas to be un-indexable, not directly suitable to representation in any hierarchy other than those I may set them in?

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#109
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be bad, and it is already bad that Google and Microsoft control so much of search queries, but the decision about which search engine indexes a website is purely the publisher's.

But why do you believe so?

I replied in detail elsewhere:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36993739

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#110
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are right and you are wrong. If some web page is publicly available, it should be indexed. Scraping neutrality, please.

What if I want what I publish to be known only by word of mouth? What if I consider (some or any of) my ideas to be un-indexable, not directly suitable to representation in any hierarchy other than those I may set them in?

Then you should hide them behind a url that isn't linked elsewhere on your site that you can easily propagate by word of mouth only.

    example.com/correcthorsebatterystaple
If you consider "word of mouth" to be public posts on a forum which millions can read at any time then block googlebot IP's
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