I really don't understand Brave. What special thing do they offer that people actually want? The main concrete selling point seems to built-in ad blockers, but we've had that for ages in every other browser. They have some crypto stuff going on, I'll be honest, I don't understand it, because I don't care, I just want to browse the web. That should be possible without a blockchain. They claim performance is better, but at the end of the day, it's chromium, I'm skeptical that they can do much to make a huge difference. Now they're offering yet another search tool. ok. If they didn't market themselves so aggressively in tech circles I think we would have all forgotten about this.
Brave Search beta
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Re: Brave Search beta
#82Why should I switch to this from DuckDuckGo? What is the value proposition here that's somehow greater than it's alternatives (DDG, Searx, etc.)?
Re: Brave Search beta
#83I really don't understand Brave. What special thing do they offer that people actually want? The main concrete selling point seems to built-in ad blockers, but we've had that for ages in every other browser. They have some crypto stuff going on, I'll be honest, I don't understand it, because I don't care, I just want to browse the web. That should be possible without a blockchain. They claim performance is better, bu…
People want a browser with an ad-blocker, and are too lazy to configure it themselves. Brave adds it and starts some "tell your friends" marketing hype. The rest writes itself.
Re: Brave Search beta
#84Apparently, 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.
Check this recent podcast with Brave‘s founder, where, among other things, he is talking about how the search is implemented: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/modern-finance/id13386...
Re: Brave Search beta
#85Also interesting search for 'jan 6' and compare. It seems Brave and Google return similar results which differ from Bing and Duckduckgo, which resemble each other.
Re: Brave Search beta
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/ref…
The problem is that referral programs are intended to get people who wouldn't have signed up for a site to use it, and for binance that means getting people not already signed up to sign up and trade crypto on binance.us. This includes the referer getting up to 40% of trading fees[0]. Even for the example where a user chooses between the search 'binance' and `binance.us/?ref=`, in both cases they were already planning to visit and/or sign up for the crypto trading site, Brave didn't do any referring themselves. The profit sharing aspect makes it far-removed from the notion of just being for traffic attribution.
0: https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360047428793-Re...
Re: Brave Search beta
#87Previous 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…
DuckDuckGo allows you to do a Google search by prepending "!g" to any query. So usually I do that for the last 5% of queries that DDG fails on.
The frustration I am talking about is:
Check query result -> realize the result is bad -> scroll back to the search bar -> place cursor at the beginning of the query -> enter "!g" -> redirect to Google.com
It is not too bad on desktop, but doing it once on a smartphone is more than enough to push me to switch back to Google.
Re: Brave Search beta
#88I’ve been using it. Seems like a solid search engine. Interestingly, Google appeared to be censoring results yesterday to hide reports about an unfortunate shooting at a Juneteenth event in Oakland and a subsequent situation where a crowd of people were blocking an ambulance from exiting the area of the shooting with wounded victims. Let’s just say the story didn’t play well to Google’s political base… so they hid it…
Do events show up on Google search that quickly, and in turn, get censored that quickly? I saw the video of what you are referring to on Twitter. Just searched on Google, "alameda twerking", and the first four results I see are for this incident.
Well I'd be interested in hearing how Brave search was able to surface results faster than Google yesterday... YouTube (another Alphabet echo chamber) was/is also removing video of the ambulance incident, so it was definitely on the big tech thought police radar.
Re: Brave Search beta
#89Previous 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…
DuckDuckGo does the exact same thing with shebangs. Brave's implementation is just less granular.
Re: Brave Search beta
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
> 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?