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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#51

Post by jonathansampson »

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://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/

- The Tor/DNS issue resulted from https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/

Re: Brave Search beta

#52

Post by x4e »

Zhyl wrote: post #37
open-paren wrote: post #11

Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index, it will then get it from Google or Bing. I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.

In December '19 the company that would end up being acquired by Brave did a number of blog posts [0] where they explained the tech. The short answer is 'a lot of word2vec'. [0] https://www.0x65.dev/

Funny how their posts show such a different approach to their browser than Braves. E.g. forking Firefox not Chromium, implementing functionality as extension instead of in browser where possible...

Re: Brave Search beta

#53

Post by w0ts0n »

Santosh83 wrote: post #34

Contrary to Brave Search's instructions to click the three dots (...) in Firefox's URL bar to add Brave Search, I don't get the dots at all. I do get Brave Search as a button when I click the URL bar and it drops down, but if I click on the Brave Search icon to add it, Firefox says: Invalid format Firefox could not install the search engine from: https://search.brave.com/auth/assets/opensearch.xml

Edit: Try now, fix is out.

We are aware of the issue. We have a fix pending.

Re: Brave Search beta

#55

Post by x4e »

colesantiago wrote: post #18
open-paren wrote: post #11

Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index, it will then get it from Google or Bing. I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.

I still wouldn't use it since it falls back to Bing or Google.

What search engine would you use then? This is what pretty much every alternative search engine does...

Re: Brave Search beta

#56

Post by ramesh1994 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19
open-paren wrote: post #11

Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index, it will then get it from Google or Bing. I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.

So, note that Brave brought in the Cliqz/Tailcat team to build this: While it's a "new search engine", I'm guessing the data and algorithms they were working on previously have all made it into this project at some point. Cliqz launched in 2015, so there's a number of years of work put in.

I would also highly recommend the blog post series [1] from Cliqz talking about the tech behind the search.

[1] - https://0x65.dev/

Re: Brave Search beta

#57

Post by andai »

jonathansampson wrote: post #35
colesantiago wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still wouldn't use it since it falls back to Bing or Google.

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

> Note that choosing this option has no effect on your privacy. If you happen to have a Google account, Google will not be able to associate your query with this account.

I'm confused about "routed through the browser" -- is the browser talking to Google directly, but without sending the login cookies, and then hoping Google doesn't associate searches from your IP with your identity?

Re: Brave Search beta

#58

Post by [deleted] »

open-paren wrote: post #11

Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index, it will then get it from Google or Bing. I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.

[deleted]

Re: Brave Search beta

#59

Post by andai »

x4e wrote: post #55
colesantiago wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still wouldn't use it since it falls back to Bing or Google.

What search engine would you use then? This is what pretty much every alternative search engine does...

Try our new Google alternative!

* Powered by Google

Re: Brave Search beta

#60

Post by jonathansampson »

judge2020 wrote: post #39
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.

Didn't even realize the extent of the referral codes. Imagine if Chrome auto-inserted their own amazon affiliate links when people typed in Amazon.com - people would be up in arms.

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/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. No element of this is malicious.

As for what others do, traffic attribution is common. Open Firefox and perform a search from the address bar. Long before you press Enter, Firefox has already sent keystrokes off to Google.com (assuming you haven't changed your default search engine), along with a tag on the URL identifying Firefox as the source of the traffic.

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