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Brave Search beta

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Re: Brave Search beta

#631

Post by jonathansampson »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #438
jonathansampson wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effective…

You're absolutely right that some people are not interested in ads, at all. And this is why they install content-blockers and more. This doesn't change the fact that many others install things like uBlock Origin for their security and privacy benefits. This is precisely why Brave ships with Brave Ads and Rewards disabled by default. We believe that the out of box experience should be blocking. This works for both parties: those who want the reduced noise, and those who want the added security/privacy. I hope this helps :)

Re: Brave Search beta

#632

Post by jonathansampson »

xgulfie wrote: post #614
jonathansampson wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You've hit the nail on the head calling it the basic attention token. While you haven't literally replaced ads in the page you are still removing their ads then adding your own. You didn't replace the ad directly, but you've redirected the user's attention.

Brave blocks harmful third-party ads and trackers. This is a security and privacy matter, as these types of ads are actually small scripts/apps which run in the context of your local machine.

As malignant as third-party ads have become, they do generate revenue for content creators. As such, Brave didn't stop at "block, and let the creators figure it out." We did the work to propose a new approach to supporting content creators; one which doesn't cost the user their data/privacy in the process.

In Brave, user's have to opt-in to Ad Notifications. When they do, they set the limits (up to 10/hr) on how many ad notifications can be displayed. Matching happens locally, so the user's data never leaves their device. And 70% of each ad's revenue is allocated to the user's anonymous wallet, which can flow out to the sites they visit (and proportional to the amount of time they spend on those sites) each month.

This is indeed a replacement model; we cannot continue down the path we've been taking for 25 years. One which treats users like products, harvesting their data at every turn, and auctioning them off to a sea of third parties. There's a better way, and we're just seeing the start of it with the Brave model.

Re: Brave Search beta

#633

Post by jonathansampson »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #524
55555 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I buy these (banners?) and what's the min daily budget? I'm skeptical this will work long term as you're overlapping two of the worst sources of traffic: technically-inclined users and incentived attention. Would love to test it out for fun.

I would be interested to know what the conversion rate is like. Given users are literately paid to watch the ads, I'm sure it would be terrible. Worse even than a game were users have to watch an ad to get some in game currency.

CTR is at about 9% right now (industry is about 2%). The difference here is that the user gets to decide whether or not they participate, and to what degree (up to 10 ad notifications per hour presently). Ads are selected via a machine-learning component on the user's device, so with greater diversity of advertisers and inventory, relevancy increases. And, users are rewarded NOT for their clicks, but rather for their attention. If an ad notification appears, and is ignored, you're still rewarded 70% of the associated revenue.

Re: Brave Search beta

#634

Post by jonathansampson »

getcrunk wrote: post #582
ntp85 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, it is improving all the time - it’s just that for some reason the few missteps are way overpronounced. I don't understand why Firefox gets this benefit of doubt and other browsers (e.g. Brave) do not.

Well for one, because Mozilla has contributed significantly to the world and have a long history of doing so. (Thunderbird, mdn)

Brave's co-founder (and CEO) is also the co-founder of Mozilla. Our other co-founder (now CTO) was also an engineer at Mozilla for many years, and behind many of those contributions (several other Brave staff is directly connected to Mozilla as well). They started Brave in the same spirit, to improve that which is broken, and create a better, more equitable Web for all.

Re: Brave Search beta

#635

Post by losvedir »

mackrevinack wrote: post #568
hnlmorg wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite). The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean th…

DDG also makes it very to download images, unlike Google that now makes you go though to whatever site and have to scroll around in the page to find the image

Or as people like to say about Uber, DDG is doing "legal arbitrage" since they're still small and Google can't do that anymore.

Re: Brave Search beta

#636

Post by qwertox »

This is Cliqz's Tailcat search engine. Hubert Burda Media sold it to Brave earlier this year and got some shares for it in return.

I just hope that they really don't collect data or profile users, as there could exist the concern that it would get shared with Hubert Burda Media. Or if Hubert Burda Media sees this as a way to shape the search experience in favor of publishers, once it has gained a big enough user base.

https://brave.com/brave-search/

Re: Brave Search beta

#637

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

hnlmorg wrote: post #564
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…

DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite). The thing with people who switch to DDG is, they do so consciously for privacy reasons but then forget that the reason G's results are so good is because they add little bits of context in through their profiling. But that doesn't mean th…

The best thing about Google is that if you're on a website - say a travel website looking at hotels in Thailand - and then you Google "USD" it automatically completes "USD to Thai Baht" and then just gives you the answer very user friendly automatically. The same is true if you'd search "Best p" - you get "Best places to visit in Thailand" immediately, with a bunch of cards that are easy to read and use and get to more relevant things you're looking for.

Sure - this invades your privacy. But it leads to good results and a better experience.

You really don't want to give up your privacy in exchange for nothing. But this doesn't feel like the case here.

It's also just as good for location things. If I'm in different neighborhoods - I can type one letter in - and Google will pop up the right restaurant - and then in one or two clicks I can make an order.

This feels like a trade I can live with. I get it that a lot of people can't.

Re: Brave Search beta

#638

Post by tomjen3 »

jonathansampson wrote: post #398
tomjen3 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tracking isn't a necessary component of a subscription service. You can have a model with premium features and/or offerings which doesn't harvest user data, such as searches and more.

I guess you could, but then I would have to depend on the service to hold up their promise not to track me. I don't want that.

Re: Brave Search beta

#639

Post by smoldesu »

smaryjerry wrote: post #617
easrng wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say only allowing BAT withdrawal to a single hosted wallet provider that requires KYC is a pretty significant UX issue.

That’s not hostile, it’s literally a requirement in the US for crypto.

Maybe that's a sign that we should keep our browser and crypto wallets as separate entities, no?

Re: Brave Search beta

#640

Post by lern_too_spel »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #618
lern_too_spel wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the default assumption search engines have made from the beginning, is that they are free to grab whatever they want from the web, unless you ask them otherwise to please not. Which Google's robots.txt does. > scraping search results isn't illegal, by any means While scraping the results for yourself to look at might be OK, scraping results to display verbatim in another search engine without permission stretches f…

> While scraping the results for yourself to look at might be OK, scraping results to display verbatim in another search engine without permission stretches fair use. No, it doesn't, because Google results aren't copyrightable, hence, there is no such thing as fair use. It's just information anyone is free to collect and use as they see fit.

Why would rankings not be copyrightable?
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