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Brave Search launches own image and video search

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Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#71

Post by pierrefar »

The major problem with Brave search is their position about indexing and licensing content against the wishes of the website publisher. Their robot does not identify itself, meaning the publisher cannot use the standard robots.txt to block its crawling if the publisher so wishes. Incidentally, the robots.txt file has been used in court cases litigating if a search engine is legal or not.

Even worse, they state that Brave search won't index a page only if other search engines are not allowed to index it. It is morally not their right to make that call. A publisher should have full control to discriminate which search engine indexes the website's content. That's the very heart of why the Robots Exclusion Protocol exists, and Brave is brazenly ignoring it.

Even worse than that, the Brave search API allows you (for an extra fee) to get the content with a "license" to use the content for AI training? Who allowed them the right to distribute the content that way?

I wrote about all this here:

https://searchengineland.com/crawlers-search-engines-generat...

and more references elsewhere in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989129

Amusingly, while I was writing my article, this got posted to their forums, asking about how to block their crawler:

https://community.brave.com/t/stop-website-being-shown-in-br...

No reply so far.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#72

Post by soundnote »

metadat wrote: post #49
qwertox wrote: post #46

I'm always staying away from Brave because I've been confronted so many times with bait-and-switch tactics that I have the feeling that one day they will move away from being good and monetize all the collected data, even though they don't collect data. I'm so skeptical that I'm just now starting to develop a feeling of trust towards DuckDuckGo. In the browser domain, Mozilla is the only company of which I feel that…

You should check these assumptions, Mozilla has been hard at work enshittifying their entire portfolio. Instead of giving the public features they actually want (the most secure, performant, and predictable web browser), the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features. My god, there is so much telemetry in FF now, and it's tricky to hunt down all the about:configs to disable it. Not friendl…

I mind Mozilla trying to find alternate revenue sources 0%. It's a good thing: Organizations like Mozilla and Brave SHOULD be making their own money and not be stuck to the Google teat.

Mozilla doesn't go about it in as upfront way as Brave does, IME, but stuff like VPN, Pocket and other browser-related services I mind not at all.

I have no sympathy to the current political shitfest that Mozilla is as an organization, but as makers of Firefox I feel like Mozilla is in an impossible bind: Their users expect a fairytale of an independent, donation-funded browser that people spontaneously adopt, and go nuts about stuff like the inclusion of Pocket. I know, I used to be one of those people back when Pocket was introduced. But reeing about Mozilla trying to have independent funding by giving people useful services is just strange. It's exactly what they should be doing, and Brave setting up revenue streams like Talk and Search is great. Especially because they operate in the normal money universe for those of us who aren't terribly enthusiastic about crypto.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#73

Post by fsflover »

mg wrote: post #34

As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search engines on the web: Baidu Bing Brave Google Yandex You can compare their results on this search comparison page I maintain: https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1 (If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and Pexels, click on "more engines" to select all places you want to search)

One more, which is self-hosted, peer-to-peer and FLOSS: https://yacy.net

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#74

Post by reitanqild »

magicalist wrote: post #67
isaacremuant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is the one that censors less, from all those. Specially doesn't censor for political motives that I'm aware of. That already makes it worth of support. But Google having become so bad of late has made switching quite easy, even if brave is not getting better super fast, Google unfortunately is getting worse and making up for it.

> Specially doesn't censor for political motives that I'm aware of What are the censored image searches you found?

Try to search for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

That tends to upset some engines including Bing I think.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#75

Post by yreg »

pierrefar wrote: post #71

The major problem with Brave search is their position about indexing and licensing content against the wishes of the website publisher. Their robot does not identify itself, meaning the publisher cannot use the standard robots.txt to block its crawling if the publisher so wishes. Incidentally, the robots.txt file has been used in court cases litigating if a search engine is legal or not. Even worse, they state that B…

Hmm, I don't know, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it is unethical to disobey the publisher wishes.

If you post something to the open web, what's it to you who reads it and how? You can block some IPs but that's about it.

I don't know if Brave has a knowledge graph - if they do, I would understand objecting if they filled it in with “stolen” content. But I don't see what's the problem with search.

By the way, isn't everyone's favourite archive.is doing the same thing?

I have no strong opinion on this, curious to hear counter arguments.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#76

Post by yreg »

isaacremuant wrote: post #64
mg wrote: post #34

As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search engines on the web: Baidu Bing Brave Google Yandex You can compare their results on this search comparison page I maintain: https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1 (If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and Pexels, click on "more engines" to select all places you want to search)

Brave is the one that censors less, from all those. Specially doesn't censor for political motives that I'm aware of. That already makes it worth of support. But Google having become so bad of late has made switching quite easy, even if brave is not getting better super fast, Google unfortunately is getting worse and making up for it.

Interesting, I regularly use both and I find Google to perform better for me than Brave (in text search).

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#77

Post by cpeterso »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #9
lern_too_spel wrote: post #4

When will Brave Search launch a crawler update that lets me specifically block its crawler in robots.txt like every other search engine supports?

I see they say "if a domain or page is not crawlable by any search engine (it has a noindex tag), or if it is not crawlable by googlebot, then Brave Search’s bot will not crawl it either." 1: https://brave.com/search/api/

Does the Brave crawler send the Googlebot or regular Chrome User-Agent string? If it sends something different than the standard Googlebot User-Agent string, you could dynamically serve a robots.txt that blocks Googlebot to every client besides Googlebot. OTOH, I've read that the Google crawler sometimes users the regular Chrome User-Agent string and penalizes sites that return different content to Googlebot and Chrome.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#79

Post by yreg »

reitanqild wrote: post #74
magicalist wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Specially doesn't censor for political motives that I'm aware of What are the censored image searches you found?

Try to search for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. That tends to upset some engines including Bing I think.

Baidu doesn't show anything relevant as expected, but Bing, Brave, Google and Yandex show similar results. Not overly graphic, but the photos are there.

Re: Brave Search launches own image and video search

#80

Post by reitanqild »

soundnote wrote: post #72
metadat wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check these assumptions, Mozilla has been hard at work enshittifying their entire portfolio. Instead of giving the public features they actually want (the most secure, performant, and predictable web browser), the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features. My god, there is so much telemetry in FF now, and it's tricky to hunt down all the about:configs to disable it. Not friendl…

I mind Mozilla trying to find alternate revenue sources 0%. It's a good thing: Organizations like Mozilla and Brave SHOULD be making their own money and not be stuck to the Google teat. Mozilla doesn't go about it in as upfront way as Brave does, IME, but stuff like VPN, Pocket and other browser-related services I mind not at all. I have no sympathy to the current political shitfest that Mozilla is as an organization…

I also think it is great that browsers seek out alternative sources of funding.

My problems with Mozilla are:

- Misuse of money: the browser team have brought in lots of money over the years (we talk billions) and the foundation is milking it dry. If the income created by the browser had stayed with the browser team they would have had funding for years to come.

- Being dishonest: Mozilla has sought donations for Firefox and I think many of us have donated thinking we supported Firefox, while in reality the Firefox team funds itself and the rest of Mozilla and Mozilla isn't even allowed to send money the other way.

- Not being up front about what they do: they more or less lied about their relationship with Pocket. I like Pocket, both the product and as a way to bring in income, but whenever it comes up, everyone who was there starts thinking about their lies.

- Nerfing the extension API.

- Writing "dear community members" in emails begging for money while simultaneously being rude to us in responses to real issues in Bugzilla.

Now, if anyone think I use Chrome, think again.

I am still optimistically waiting for authorities to wake up and punish Google the same way they punished Microsoft - huge fines and browser ballots - but that does not mean I give Mozilla a free pass ;-)

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