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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#431

Post by smoldesu »

jonathansampson wrote: post #424
smoldesu wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.

I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592... ), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... ). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google. On the topic of te…

At this point, I think I'm more comfortable with Google getting my data than Brave. Thanks for the help!

Re: Brave Search beta

#432

Post by esjeon »

blackcat201 wrote: post #333

If Brave is just another ad company (quote in their blog post) how is this different than Google?

AFAICT, Brave has been pushing "privacy-respecting ads", which likely are less profitable and less effective than targeted ads.

Re: Brave Search beta

#433

Post by huntermeyer »

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.

No they didn't. This is misinformation. They didn't replace ads in a webpage. They displayed ads via desktop notifications or push-notifications. The end user opts in for this.

Re: Brave Search beta

#434

Post by jonathansampson »

smoldesu wrote: post #425
jonathansampson wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models: 1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution. and 2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls f…

As much as I know you want to chime in here, I'm not going to play any games where you draw the goalposts. My current options are the following: 1. I can continue to use Vivaldi and uBlock origin as a completely open-source and so far flawless combo or 2. Go out of my way to switch to a browser with dubious privacy claims, a goddamn personal cryptocurrency and (the cherry on top) a developer who spent the better half…

Happy to hear that you're staying safe online. Nobody is tracking you down though. You and I happen to be on the same page, engaging in conversation. Check my comment history and you'll see that you make up only a small fraction of the individuals to whom I have responded. All the best to you though; sincerely wish you well.

Re: Brave Search beta

#435

Post by bscphil »

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

> Is 95% really not acceptable?

Moreover, is any search engine really at 95% success rate? I certainly have never gotten that high with Google, even back in the days when Google Search was good. Nowadays it's like 85% or so. About the same as DuckDuckGo for me. No matter which one I made my default, I'd have to check the other occasionally. (Incidentally, the same is true of satellite imagery. Sometimes Bing Maps is just much better for no obvious reason.)

Re: Brave Search beta

#436

Post by jonathansampson »

hawski wrote: post #202
scoopertrooper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If all browsers end up using Blink (Google), the Web will suffer as developers will only optimize and test for the Blink rendering engine. Am I the only one that thinks that this would be a good thing? Like the entire industry sharing the same core open source technology? Write a website once and it works perfectly across all platforms?

This site works best in IE6 at 800x600.

Those were the days! I was just explaining to my children yesterday how computer games were played in 640x480 when I was their age. I remember designing websites for that resolution too; still impresses me what we were able to do with so few pixels, lol.

Re: Brave Search beta

#437

Post by lethoso »

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…

"No revenue was made from this feature either." Isn't that just stating that you were caught before you had the chance to make money from it?

Re: Brave Search beta

#438

Post by jay_kyburz »

jonathansampson wrote: post #409
someperson wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Hi Jonathan, here is my hot take on the issue.

When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them into buying things.

When Brave blocks ads in one place, but shows others ads instead, the users are not actually protected from the ads, any potential money that may have been generated by the ads is effectively stolen by Brave.

It's smells to us like you are just stealing peoples content.

Re: Brave Search beta

#439

Post by jonathansampson »

1_player wrote: post #336
jonathansampson wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why is it only available on Brave? Doesn't make any sense.

Because you cannot issue a cross-site request to Google from the client due to CORS policies. This feature required work in the Brave browser itself, so that the application would serve as a pipeline for the request on behalf of the search page itself.

Re: Brave Search beta

#440

Post by jonathansampson »

gundmc wrote: post #287
jonathansampson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't sharing it with Brave directly, but rather with users. The query is issued via the participating user's Brave instance. This data then supplements what Brave Search has found, and assists Brave Search in presenting better results to that user, and others, in the future.

This sounds like a dishonest way of bypassing payment for Google search API by impersonating a request from a user.

It's still a request from the user; the user consents to issuing these requests on behalf of Brave Search when they opt-in to Fallback Mixing. Anybody can issue calls to Google's search engine.
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