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

401–410 of 697 posts

Re: Brave Search beta

#401

Post by jonathansampson »

Semaphor wrote: post #256
jonathansampson wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The user was replying to using DDG with !g In an indirect way, it’s possible by doing !sp on DDG, which redirects the search to startpage, which shows untracked google results.

Ah, my apologies for any confusion. For what it's worth, the !sp bang is supported on Brave Search as well :)

Re: Brave Search beta

#402

Post by Clewza313 »

jonathansampson wrote: post #379
howolduis wrote: post #367

> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting". Brave is just a "pop-priv…

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…

Disclosure: the author of this comment appears to be a Senior Developer Relations Specialist at Brave.

Re: Brave Search beta

#403

Post by GendingMachine »

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

Honestly the main reason I ended up abandoning DDG is because you can't see the publish date on search results.

I know it's a fairly minor feature and one manipulated often by some websites, but I've still found it massively increases my chances of picking a relevant and up to date result. I didn't even realise how much I used it until I found myself getting extremely frustrated about its absence in DDG.

Re: Brave Search beta

#404

Post by someperson »

jonathansampson wrote: post #393
smoldesu wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Their attitude towards advertisement and cryptocurrency is the reddest flag imaginable.

Elaborate, please? The blockchain enables everybody to participate, earn, and support content creators in an low-friction, anonymous manner. Advertisements serve as a great way to introduce revenue into the system (by way of advertisers who wish to reach an audience). Brave pulls it all together into a single, OPTIONAL component, which guards the user's privacy and security by conducting its operation locally, on the…

Brave blocks webpage's existing ads then replace the ads with their own ad network that earns the website owner Brave-money that the website owner then has to redeem.

That tactic is definitely a red flag.

Re: Brave Search beta

#405

Post by smoldesu »

jonathansampson wrote: post #395
smoldesu wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brave has a culture of user-hostile UX Yep. The missteps that they've made over the past few years do not give me any confidence in the future of the project.

What missteps? The only notable UX issue we've had was years ago, and was a matter of naïve design. When we were made aware of the issue, it was corrected within 48 hours. Hard to portray that as a "culture of hostile UX".

Maybe you could start by listening instead of accosting every comment that you find. Your incessant reply-bombing is childish and unprofessional, nobody wants to engage with someone who defends a browser like it's their sole lifeline.

Furthermore, you don't get to choose what your "UX issues" are. "UX" quite literally stands for "users experience", which is on the other side of the spectrum from "developer experience". As a dev myself, I know it's difficult not to conflate the two, but acting like issues straight up don't exist is blatantly hostile.

I have no personal qualms against Brave. I'm just another developer who wants a browser, and Brave's naive featureset doesn't appeal to me: that's fine. I'm just helping other, similar users make the right choice.

Re: Brave Search beta

#406

Post by jonathansampson »

striking wrote: post #397
jonathansampson wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, including nearly all of DDG's !bangs :) We also add in some others, such as !so for StackOverflow, !gh for GitHub, and !mdn for the Mozilla Developer Network.

Those are also in DDG.

Wouldn't surprise me; DDG has an impressive list of !bangs (more than 13K, IIRC). Thanks for the clarification!

Re: Brave Search beta

#407

Post by pmurt7 »

howolduis wrote: post #367

> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting". Brave is just a "pop-priv…

"Mozilla’s Mr. Robot promo backfires after it installs a Firefox extension without permission":

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/mozillas-mr-robot-promo-ba...

All companies make mistakes. That's part of the journey. This affiliate referral code thing is becoming boring at this point. It was 2 years ago. Move on. Better look at what Brave is doing good right now, but I suspect you have an agenda, so you can't.

Re: Brave Search beta

#409

Post by jonathansampson »

someperson wrote: post #404
jonathansampson wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate, please? The blockchain enables everybody to participate, earn, and support content creators in an low-friction, anonymous manner. Advertisements serve as a great way to introduce revenue into the system (by way of advertisers who wish to reach an audience). Brave pulls it all together into a single, OPTIONAL component, which guards the user's privacy and security by conducting its operation locally, on the…

Brave blocks webpage's existing ads then replace the ads with their own ad network that earns the website owner Brave-money that the website owner then has to redeem. That tactic is definitely a red flag.

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 their attention (70% of the associated ad-revenue). Ads are displayed within Brave and on the user's desktop; ads are not displayed in any publisher-owned space (e.g. a website or YouTube channel).

With these rewards, users are able to contribute to [verified] sites, channels, etc. The publisher/content-creator must already be verified to receive any rewards from users. If a user attempts to contribute to a non-verified site, the tokens remain on the user's device for up to 90 days.

This isn't much different from how PayPal allows you to send money to an arbitrary email address, regardless if it is associated with a verified PayPal account or not. This model simply addresses the problem of blocking harmful ads and trackers, while offering no alternative means of supporting those same content creators.

Post reply on HN