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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#221

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

You can't have something be zero tracking and paid since they need to know if you have paid and so need to be able to track you.

I use DDG for my main search, but there is the !g (i think) that you can prefix a search with to get it sent to google through DDG.

Re: Brave Search beta

#222

Post by jonathansampson »

aazaa wrote: post #193
mrpf1ster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo allows you to do a Google search by prepending "!g" to any query. So usually I do that for the last 5% of queries that DDG fails on.

It redirects to Google. So the effect (including tracking) is identical to just doing a Google search.

This is incorrect. Fallback-Mixing, if you have enabled it (which requires Brave), issues an anonymous query to Google, lacking any cookies or other persistent state for that domain. These results are then presented along with Brave Search's own results. There's no tracking involved. If you perform a direct Google search, you're passing along your cookies as well.

Re: Brave Search beta

#223

Post by tnorthcutt »

jonathansampson wrote: post #51
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.

You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; that isn't the case. Brave is designed in every way to preclude abuse from the design stage, and with a Can't Be Evil mindset, as opposed to the Don't Be Evil of Google. If you have questions about Brave, or Brave Search, we're always happy to chat. - 2018 Rewards Update documented at https://brave.com/rewards-update/ - Affiliate Codes explained at https://br…

I appreciate the response! I stand by what I said, but I do appreciate you adding your perspective and sharing links so that others can read what Brave as an organization has to say about these incidents.

Re: Brave Search beta

#224

Post by [deleted] »

jonathansampson wrote: post #164
judge2020 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Brave Search beta

#225

Post by smoldesu »

axaxs wrote: post #214
smoldesu wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mind a company profiling me Not everyone has that luxury. > I just don't want them advertising to me, or selling my data Then your data is worthless to them. Nobody wants companies to abuse their personal data, that's why it's such a lucrative business. Companies like Apple and Brave get away with it by edging out competition and instating their own standards (see: Brave's Ad "replacement"). It's all so rid…

> Then your data is worthless to them This is precisely the point. It should be worse than worthless, it should cost them money. And they should charge that to me, plus some nominal fee. I guess that's what I'm asking for.

The issue is that you're not describing a sustainable business model. Sure, it would be a much better situation than we have now, but you can't cover hosting fees with data bills.

Re: Brave Search beta

#226

Post by jonathansampson »

bleachedsleet wrote: post #144
jonathansampson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're referring to Fallback Mixing , which is off by default. You have to enable it in https://search.brave.com/settings . When enabled, this feature will (at times) pull in results from Google via an anonymous query, routed through the browser. Read more about it here: https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback

It does not appear that they are exposing all possible settings configs on mobile as fallback mixing is not shown as an option for me there. This seems like an oversight to me.

Fallback Mixing is only available to Brave on desktop and Android at this time. Apologies for any confusion.

Re: Brave Search beta

#227

Post by deadite »

fossislife wrote: post #122
55555 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will definitely implement ads. They're an advertising company.

"options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search" https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/

Future post: "We have listened to our users, and we are removing ad-free paid search due to a lack of demand and [some excuses about how it's technically difficult to maintain it]."

We'll see which comes first. That post, or "Our Great Journey."

Re: Brave Search beta

#228

Post by Nicksil »

lawl wrote: post #220
Nicksil wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They pretty clearly only talk about instant answers there. You seem to be dismissing instant answers when in-fact those are exactly what the end-user expects; that's search results: Type in a query, get an answer. What am I missing here?

> You seem to be dismissing instant answers when in-fact those are exactly what the end-user expects; that's search results: Type in a query, get an answer. What am I missing here? No, I didn't, and in my first post I also said they aren't from bing: > What's not from bing are the widgets like weather, or dictionary definitions etc I also said that I've used ddg for years. Presumably that had a reason? I said the mai…

I stated

>Bing is one of many sources from which duckduckgo derives its results

You stated

>Not true.

I then backed-up my statement with a source.

You still haven't made clear what part of my statement was not true.

Re: Brave Search beta

#229

Post by gbmatt »

I've been working on this private search engine https://private.sh/ for a while. It encrypts your query using client-side javascript so only the Gigablast search engine can read your query. And your query is delivered to Gigablast through an anonymizing proxy that is not in Gigablast's control. So you get TOR-like privacy. Also Gigablast's privacy policy https://gigablast.com/privacy.html shows that your query is not transmitted to 3rd parties or used for anything other than to return your results. Gigablast also has 0 dependencies on Bing or Google.

Re: Brave Search beta

#230

Post by iudqnolq »

Seirdy wrote: post #165
jonathansampson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engi…

As a counterexample, I searched for something very obscure (only three pages on startpage) expecting to see them pulling in results from startpage to cover the long tail. I was surprised to see different results, suggesting their index is much larger than I assumed.

The query was "retail snap incentive program"

Edit: All your queries are for relatively popular terms. I wouldn't be surprised if there's just a clearly right top set of pages.

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