Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brave Search beta

search.brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 697 posts

Re: Brave Search beta

#161

Post by lawl »

Nicksil wrote: post #29
nr2x wrote: post #24

At least they are trying to build an actual index instead of rebranding Bing like duck duck.

Bing is one of many sources from which duckduckgo derives its results; kind of like what's going on here with Brave's new search.

Not true. In practice I've found their results to be basically identical to bing and other bing front-ends. What's not from bing are the widgets like weather, or dictionary definitions etc.

So imo, "many sources, bing is just one" is misleading, as the main SERPs are pretty much straight up bing.

(Note: I've used ddg as my main search engine for years)

Re: Brave Search beta

#162

Post by smoldesu »

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.

Yep. The fact that it even existed in the Brave browser at any point in time is enough to eternally dissuade me from using it.

Re: Brave Search beta

#163

Post by zzyzxd »

lopatin wrote: post #102
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…

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.

IMHO search ads are bad search results, and in 99% of time they are not something I would want to click. So they are doing nothing useful but only adding friction to my search experience. I am not against privacy friendly ads in free services, but if there's an option to pay to get rid of ads, I will pay.

Re: Brave Search beta

#164

Post by jonathansampson »

judge2020 wrote: post #86
jonathansampson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's traffic attribution; Brave showed the affiliate option to users via a pre-search UI panel in the browser (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png ). Users could then decide to use the top suggested result, or not. The mistake here was matching on fully-qualified URLs, as opposed to search-input exclusively (the intended behavior). You can read more about it here: https://brave.com/ref…

The problem is that referral programs are intended to get people who wouldn't have signed up for a site to use it, and for binance that means getting people not already signed up to sign up and trade crypto on binance.us. This includes the referer getting up to 40% of trading fees[0]. Even for the example where a user chooses between the search 'binance' and `binance.us/?ref=`, in both cases they were already plannin…

If you read the post covering the feature in Brave, and reviewed the screenshots of its implementation, you'd see that the intent here was to respond to user input, and offer the user the option of using Brave's referral link. The intent was never to coerce users into using the link; it was merely presented as an option—a clean and clear way to support Brave development.

It is still an example of traffic attribution, as is the case with Firefox sending your keystrokes to Google asynchronously (marked with the Firefox identifier). This is how Firefox continues to get paid, by sending users over to the Google search engine. In the case of Brave, this identifier was shown to the user prior to any network activity. That isn't the case with Firefox (and nearly every other popular browser).

Re: Brave Search beta

#165

Post by Seirdy »

jonathansampson wrote: post #123
Seirdy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has not been my experience. Comparing results with Google, Startpage, and a Searx instance with only Google enabled reveals that the results are almost always from Google. Sometimes they merge multiple results that share a domain. I decided to add them to the "Semi-Independent" category of my collection of indexing search engines: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

Brave Search doesn't fall-back to Google; not unless you have enabled Fallback Mixing in https://search.brave.com/settings/ . Brave Search has its own index; the results may resemble those of other engines at times, but they aren't pulled from those engines (again, noting the exception of Fallback Mixing , an optional feature offered to the user via Settings).

I'm testing on Firefox and the Tor browser right now, JS disabled. I also disabled cookies in Firefox. Searches for "Seirdy", "Neovim", "gccgo", and others return results identical to Google, Startpage, and Searx instances with only Google enabled. No other independent engine of all the 25 other English independently-indexing engines I compared in the article has had this happen; identical pages on all the other engines are nearly impossible to find for advanced/uncommon queries.

90% of queries being identical to Google but different from the 25 other independent engines is one hell of a coincidence.

Archived example:

Brave results for "gccgo": https://web.archive.org/web/20210622172743/https://search.br...

Google results for "gccgo" (proxied through Startpage): https://web.archive.org/web/20210622172939/https://startpage...

If this is a bug, it's very serious and needs to be publicly disclosed.

Edit: more examples:

Brave results for "oppenheimer": https://web.archive.org/web/20210622173647/https://search.br...

Google results for "Oppenheimer" (proxied through Startpage): https://web.archive.org/web/20210622173658/https://startpage...

Re: Brave Search beta

#166

Post by truth_ »

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…

> Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo

I have been using Startpage for a while. It's results are same as Google, but with zero tracking. But it puts (non-personalized) ads in results.

Re: Brave Search beta

#167

Post by smoldesu »

entropie wrote: post #146
vlunkr wrote: post #81

I really don't understand Brave. What special thing do they offer that people actually want? The main concrete selling point seems to built-in ad blockers, but we've had that for ages in every other browser. They have some crypto stuff going on, I'll be honest, I don't understand it, because I don't care, I just want to browse the web. That should be possible without a blockchain. They claim performance is better, bu…

> What special thing do they offer that people actually want? I tried every browser and was a long term chrome user. I tried brave and was immediately sold. I use(d) chrome/chromium (and recently used vivaldi) on 3 different plattforms. Brave is noticeable faster on every one. I use it for like 3 month now and never looked back. Its a very pleasant experience for me.

> Brave is noticeable faster on every one

This is interesting, because in my experience Ungoogled Chromium/Vivaldi feels much snappier than Brave across my computers. Especially on older devices (like my trusty X201), Brave starts to really chug when I open more than 4 or 5 tabs.

Re: Brave Search beta

#168

Post by phreeza »

I don't quite remember, but wasn't the cliqz search engine ranking function somehow built on tracking users, kind of contrary to what brave stands for?

Re: Brave Search beta

#169

Post by jonathansampson »

smoldesu wrote: post #162
AegirLeet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep. The fact that it even existed in the Brave browser at any point in time is enough to eternally dissuade me from using it.

The BAT (and before it, Bitcoin) is there as an optional feature. It's not on or enabled by default. It's there for users who wish to anonymously earn rewards for their attention, and use those rewards to support content creators on the Web.

Re: Brave Search beta

#170

Post by smoldesu »

bsclifton wrote: post #110
vlunkr wrote: post #81

I really don't understand Brave. What special thing do they offer that people actually want? The main concrete selling point seems to built-in ad blockers, but we've had that for ages in every other browser. They have some crypto stuff going on, I'll be honest, I don't understand it, because I don't care, I just want to browse the web. That should be possible without a blockchain. They claim performance is better, bu…

Have you given it a try? The crypto-currency parts are optional (you have to actually enable them). Brave has got a solid adblocker and privacy features out of the box

Google's targeted advertising campaign is also optional, that doesn't make me any more comfortable with the fact that it exists.
Post reply on HN