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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#501

Post by jay_kyburz »

renewiltord wrote: post #490
jay_kyburz wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effective…

Considering their ads are opt-in this argument makes no sense. Which class of person both wants to “protect themselves from ads” and opts in? Brave isn’t a browser I use but you guys are not even reading the comments you’re responding to.

People who are tricked into thinking they are helping content creators by watching the ads that Brave serves. People who feel like they might be stealing a contents creators work unless the watch the ads.

Why would anybody opt in to watch the ads otherwise?

Update: Sorry, I just ready below that _users_ are paid up to 70% to watch ads which I did not realize even though that is what is said above. Explains why you would opt in.

Re: Brave Search beta

#502

Post by shp0ngle »

Well. When I google myself, I find one page entirely of me, engineer from East Europe. When I Brave-search myself, I find my namesake from Ohio that died in 1919.

But, I learned something new about Cleveland Ohio in early 20th century, so I guess it's not that bad.

Re: Brave Search beta

#503

Post by maeil »

tomstockmail wrote: post #491
iJohnDoe wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends are which side of the table you’re sitting at. I like Brave and many other people do. Just look at any of the other HN posts about Brave. Since I like Brave, from this side of the table it looks like the anti-Brave people come out in full force to try to spew the same old crap and badmouth Brave. At the point it is the tired old crap, which most has been debunked already.

With the referral program and integration with a cryptocurrency, anyone can shill for it. It's hard if not impossible to know if someone promoting Brave has a stake in BAT or not. Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth") don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn people.

There is hardly a significant website out there with a higher concentration of Google and Microsoft employees than Hackernews, in light of which that's quite the baffling comment to make.

Re: Brave Search beta

#504

Post by eyelidlessness »

jonathansampson wrote: post #464
smoldesu wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you seem to know it all I'll just leave you be. My only actionable advice is that you should hire someone nicer to handle public relations, lest you bleed users from your own mouth.

I do believe I've been quite respectful with you. If at any time I was caustic, abrasive, or offensive, I apologize. It is certainly not my intention.

From my read through the thread, you're being very nice, but also very dismissive. That's not actually respectful, even if it's not the harsh things you describe. And it's not kind. If you disagree with someone's experience that you feel passionately about defending, you might have better luck defending it by taking a moment to think about what they experienced differently from your own experience, how much you care about that different experience, and how you might incorporate that into future action. Not everything needs public relations, and it can definitely feel uncaring if it's mostly public explainings.

Re: Brave Search beta

#505

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine."

In 1998 when Google's founders announced their search engine they claimed it would be less commercial, more academic, more transparent and they would avoid the influence of advertising. Did things "go as planned." Not even close. What is the lesson here.

Meanwhile, every search submitted during the "beta" period is subject to none of those limitations.

"So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result is on the same page, or just one click away."

Brave is not the first to do that. Check out Gigablast, for example. If I am not mistaken, they also claim to use an "independent index". At least, they provide the source to a crawler and server.^1 That is what people should be excited about. Not Gigablast per se but the idea of an open source search engine that anyone can run. searx is another project worth looking at.^2

How many ways are results promoted and demoted; what are the factors used. Are these search engines that comenters are recommending in this thread transparent. (Making promises on a blog is not "transparency" IMO.) Where is the source code. What are the various server settings that alternatives like Google, DDG, Brave, Startpage, etc. never provide to users. This stuff should matter, yet the discussion of search engines always seems to devolve into personal usage anecdotes and "search shortcuts". Every user has different needs and preferences.

There are many knobs in web search that advertising-supporting tech companies providing "search engine" websites will never let users twiddle. The source code for those servers is not public.

1. To get an idea of type of settings users of popular search engines are not being allowed to control:

(Scroll down to "SEARCH CONTROLS") https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gigablast/open-source-sear...

2. https://github.com/searx/searx

For a current list of searx public instances

   curl https://searx.space/data/instances.json|grep -Eo '(A\+", .[^"]*.{4}[^"]*)'|cut -d/ -f5|uniq|sed 's>.*>https://&>'

Re: Brave Search beta

#506

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Brave Search beta

#507

Post by Karunamon »

aloisdg wrote: post #314
rglullis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No monopoly or monoculture, even if open source, is good. It is not just about the features that you think makes your life better, you have also to consider the potential catastrophic bugs that could be exploited and leave everyone without an alternative. Evolution only happens when there is divergence and competition.

> Evolution only happens when there is divergence and competition. Not when we can a have a logic stable and well made standard. Like the metric system. I am pretty sure that I would have a problem with any alternative to the metric system. The more we are to use it the better it become. Evolution can and thrive through cooperation and mutual aid. I would be fine with having one standard implementation of a browser e…

The problem there is that metric basically equates to math at the end of the day, I don't think those are directly comparable. It would be very strange (and new) to have one and only one implementation of an entire class of software, instead of a technical standard with multiple different implementations.

Re: Brave Search beta

#508

Post by nextstep »

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.

Wow, thank you for sharing. I think I’ll stick with Google for now because they’ve never done anything morally questionable.

Re: Brave Search beta

#509

Post by propogandist »

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…

Honey, a browser extension that harvests user data and injects its own affiliate links was acquired by Paypal for $4 Billion.

Publishers are shilling amazon's prime day because they're all amazon affiliates wanting to earn their commission. Similarly, all those "price comparison" and coupon sites are injecting affiliate codes and just redirecting you to the merchant.

I don't see how Brave did something egregious injecting affiliate codes to earn commission from certain vendors, if one of their users signed up for a service. Keep in mind the dominant, alternative browser (Chrome), built by an advertising company, is privacy hostile and trying to use new tracking technology (FLOC) as they phase out cookies. Firefox is kept alive largely by $ paid by Google and seems to be getting worse with each release also. I'd rather see a competitive browser that doesn't have to take $$ from Google to stay alive.

Re: Brave Search beta

#510

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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