Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling

https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_engine/

by samizdis • 5 years ago

931 411 5 years ago

samizdis3• 5 years ago

Brave Search's index there will be informed the activities of participating Brave users, in terms of the URLs they search for or click on, and adjacent web resources that don't require extensive crawling.
Brave also envisions users taking a more active role in their search results through a filtering mechanism.

"It allows different groups to run their own sort of Turing complete filter rules, sort of like ad blocking rules in the search service and not in the browser, to have a community moderated view of the global index," he [Brendan Eich, Brave founder] explained. "It's called 'Goggles.'"

topspin3• 5 years ago

I'd love to be able to filter out, for instance, pinterest.

I'd actually pay nominal amounts of money for a search service that had my interests in mind; as opposed to advertisers and thought police.

WarOnPrivacy3• 5 years ago

and thought police

samizdis3• 5 years ago

I was pretty sure that it could be done in Google with operators in the search box (going back a few years), but I don't use Google any more and one reason I stopped was that it kept incrementally degrading the ability to refine individual searches manually. Anyhow, I just did a DDG search and came across this [1], which looks interesting for your use case (although that Pinterest is mentioned is a coincidence). I've not tried it out, so I can't recommend, comment or anything.

[1] https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-remove-pinteres...

ceh1232• 5 years ago

Shameless plug, but I've been working on a project [0] that does exactly this. Currently it just has a few filters I've created for myself and only supports web search (and a few !bang like re-directs), but I'm working on implementing user accounts that will be able to create their own filters.

[0] https://hadal.io

depingus• 5 years ago

You can just add -site:pinterest.com in DuckDuckGo. I think you can do the same in Google.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

Me too — most image searches need a "-pinterest" term added.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

Turing incomplete. Thanks, will get a correction to the reporter.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

Fixed. Thanks again.

kuu• 5 years ago

(I'm not sure if even duplicated)

ErikVandeWater• 5 years ago

I don't know much about Brave - What is their position on censorship (other than instances when it is legally required)?

samizdis3• 5 years ago

The Register article mentions it in passing, pointing to the "Goggles" paper [1] that Brave has published. But the Brave paper actually gives no more information than that quoted in the article; it seems not to address its stance on censorship, but merely to pass the buck in the Goggles use case:

There will be Goggles created by creationists, anti-vaccination sup- porters or flat-earthers. However, the biases will be explicit, and therefore, the choice is a conscious one. We do not anticipate any need for censorship in the context of Goggles. Clearly illegal and sensitive content like child pornography or extreme violence should already be filtered out by the host search engine at the index layer. Consequently, such content should not be surfaced by any Goggle.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-B3ZvHpbnxsT2OdnUH8vS3-tvTv...

dazc• 5 years ago

Likely the same as Google, no policy on censorship until they feel like censoring something.

tharne• 5 years ago

Glad to see more interest in privacy focused search, but why not just not contribute to something like duckduckgo that's already doing good work in that space?

lumost• 5 years ago

Duck duck go simply proxies other search engines. While they have been gaining traffic, they will never be as good as google/bing etc.

Good privacy focused search requires novel innovations and a solid attempt to "solve" the problem rather than simply wrapping some other engine.

tachyonbeam• 5 years ago

They should have some small team working on their own search engine. A handful of skilled programmers can accomplish a lot over a couple of years.

coldtea2• 5 years ago

Because DDG merely uses Google and so under the covers.

Plus, we don't know DDG respects privacy, it's just some generic statement they make.

im3w1l• 5 years ago

I believe it's a legally binding statement. Which is not as good as a mathematical proof, but better than nothing.

jhoechtl3• 5 years ago

Afaik it's Bing?

Daho0n8• 5 years ago

As generic as Brave's then. What's your point?

rasengan• 5 years ago

As many mentioned, DDG is Bing and Google under the hood. That being said, DDG is great and I’m very thankful it exists.

Shameless Plug: I’m involved in a project called Private Search [1], and we are always interested in partnerships with browsers. Feel free to contact me directly. My email is in my profile!

[1] https://private.sh

jhoechtl3• 5 years ago

DDG is the wolf disguised as the sheep. If you consider the vast possibilities a company is able to trace you over the internets it's largely irrelevant where are you coming from, as long as you hop once over a server operated by BigCorp.

And in the case of DDG the results come from Bing. From the rain in the eaves.

fsflover• 5 years ago

Or better to https://yacy.net or SearX.

pcdoodle• 5 years ago

I hope it will be able to find relevant results like google did last decade.

WarOnPrivacy3• 5 years ago

For the love of BOb, we desperately need a search engine that obeys booleans (DDG doesn't) and isn't Google. Please let this be it.

mberning• 5 years ago

I wish them the best of luck. DuckDuckGo is my go to, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

WarOnPrivacy3• 5 years ago

DuckDuckGo is my go to, but it leaves a lot to be desired

I have a fantasy where a lone basement nerd storms DDG HQ and teaches them about quotes at gunpoint.

Semaphor• 5 years ago

They won’t be alone, I’m coming with them :(

tumetab1• 5 years ago

That also my reaction when reading the title.

More than a privacy focus search engine I want a equally good search engine as Google. Google has some defects but it's by far better than the competition.

cute_boi• 5 years ago

can we trust brave? They have become too shady in my opinion like inserting referral etc?

willis9363• 5 years ago

I tried brave a year ago because I heard good things. I stopped using it within a month. The cryptocurrency and referral stuff told me all I needed to know: their motives are not aligned with the user. If you let your monetization strategy alienate your users then you won’t be getting far. Early adopters need clear messages of trust.

When the messaging is “we’re desperate for money” and I don’t trust you, why would I expect you to value my privacy? I won’t be trying brave again until they at least try to address this.

prionassembly2• 5 years ago

What is the referral stuff? The crypto is optional.

justfortechnews2• 5 years ago

Seems to me that you're a small minority, and that most Brave users feel that the company IS aligned with them. The cryptocurrency was a key aspect for early user adoption, and the referral stuff is something that I only ever see mentioned on HN by clearly-biased commenters.

The messaging is not 'we're desperate for money', it's 'we're not funded by selling our users' personal data and are working to make a browser product that can self-sustain', something that, as of now, no other browser has been able to do.

Daho0n8• 5 years ago

People are so desperate to like Brave that they can't see the bad things. I wouldn't trust Brave, especially when there are better options like Mozilla that isn't part of the monolith that is Chrome. It's the new Internet Explorer no matter what skin you theme it with.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

Mozilla depends almost entirely on Google for revenue. As Firefox loses share, it gets less. This looks likely to spiral down until a collapse of some sort. I was stunned to learn that Apple has hired 35 people (almost all engineers) from Mozilla over the last few years.

NelsonMinar• 5 years ago

You never could trust Brave. Their business has been unethical since its founding.

jerf4• 5 years ago

"The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option..."

How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.

@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can't believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it's free. But if I'm a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you're doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn't be worth losing me as a customer.

I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there.

jhoechtl3• 5 years ago

There is a cost in order to be free(ed).

Would be a nice study to determine the monthly rate one is willing to pay in order not to the be the service.

Terretta• 5 years ago

Perhaps the going rate could be established in "units of text editor subscription".

How much time do you spend in search bar and results versus one of several non-coding text editors that you subscribe to? Price accordingly.

ohduran5• 5 years ago

100% this. There is a glass ceiling to the quality of a search engine if it's free; it starts with G.

The paid option hasn't been explored yet, and for good reason I think: in principle, you need training data for it to be any good. And, again in principle, the only way to amass user data is for the service to be free, leveraging that to sharpen the tool.

So in principle, I reckon this is doomed to fail. But I might be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. And that's enough.

gtirloni• 5 years ago

What kind of training are the users providing that makes G better? I thought their secret was that they have better infrastructure to crawl and organize information?

I don't see how a paid search engine has a disadvantage here.

schnable2• 5 years ago

Personally, I don't have a problem with a service using aggregated usage data to improve their algorithms, even if that is technically "tracking" me. It's the selling of personalized segment data that bothers me.

sdenton4• 5 years ago

One possible upside is the Metafilter principle: If you charge $5, you get a higher quality signal by excluding a lot of chaff. The probability that your search engine user is human gets much closer to 1, and you save a lot (but not all) of the anti-abuse effort. This gives you better signal on which websites are interesting, so you need possibly orders of magnitude less data to do a good job.

dimes• 5 years ago

Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, except in cases like DDG or Brave that stake their reputation on privacy. For instance, I pay for groceries, yet my grocery store tracks my purchases and sells that information. We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed.

jerf4• 5 years ago

It is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There's no way to convince me you aren't tracking if it's free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me.

Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402

imwillofficial7• 5 years ago

Agreed, however thats a poor example. Your purchases are tracked via loyalty programs, which you are compensated for with a reduced price on goods.

gambler• 5 years ago

Government regulation is needed.

Hopefully not the kind of regulation that puts a breaking burden on companies like Brave, while letting big tech do whatever they want after a token fine.

andy_ppp2• 5 years ago

The grocery store sells everything I buy to who, and is that information personally identifying? This seems insane that me buying a brand of toothpaste could be fed back into Google for more surveillance, but here we are.

fastball4• 5 years ago

Not sure I follow your logic. Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them.

If consumers didn't use these services because of such behavior, it would no longer be profitable to do so.

It's not the job of the market to protect your privacy, that's your job. Don't use a search engine that tracks you if you're worried about being tracked. It really is that simple.

As for guarantees about not being tracked, that's agreed upon in the ToS – so if the ToS says "we can track you however you want" (e.g. Googles) then don't use it. If it says "we won't track you" (DDG's) then do.

AnthonyMouse2• 5 years ago

We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy.

You don't get from your first point to here.

The cause of the market failure is that once you give your data to someone, you can't know what they do with it. The solution is for them to never have it in the first place.

This has technical solutions. Your data stays on your device, not their servers, or if it is on their servers then it's encrypted. Don't do anything client-server that could be federated or P2P etc. Publish the source code.

This needs a business model. But "you pay money to fund development and then get software including source code that you run on your device" is a business model. If people want this they can have it. Go stuff cash into some open source projects by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack or whatever people are using now, and then use them.

The alternative doesn't actually solve the problem. You give your data to Google, the government says Google can't do X with it, but you still have no way to verify that they're not doing X because once they have your data, X happens entirely at Google where you have no way of observing it.

It also fails to protect against covert defections by both parties where the government gets all your data in exchange for looking the other way while the corporation does whatever they want with it too. You need to be able to prove that it's not happening, or it is.

ragnese• 5 years ago

Agreed. Just look all other paid software, computer services, and even computing machines.

Microsoft charges you for a Windows license and still tracks you. I have little doubt Adobe, et al, are selling your data. Amazon surely makes money when I buy something from their site, but they track me anyway. Etc, etc.

danbruc• 5 years ago

At least you can probably take them to court if you pay for the service and not being tracked but they still do.

wpietri5• 5 years ago

Depends on the goal of the organization, really. For organizations that follow the current business dogma (maximize short-term profit/increase shareholder value) then yes, they always have an incentive to screw over whomever they can.

But that's not how everybody thinks. The Craigslist leaders, for example. From 2006: "She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). 'That definitely is not part of the equation,' he said, according to MediaPost. 'It’s not part of the goal.'" [1]

I do agree that privacy regulation is necessary to set a floor, though. Since our current system over-rewards juicing short-term metrics, we have to compensate by blocking the worst of the exploitative behaviors.

[1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the...

akudha• 5 years ago

Until the situation improves, maybe we can just pay cash for groceries?

phkahler• 5 years ago

> Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking.

No, but it can remove the necessity.

Some people can be satisfied with a business of X profitability, but once it goes public there is really no hope IMHO.

TheKarateKid• 5 years ago

Exactly. We could end up like cable television where we pay for the service and STILL get shown ads and in the Internet's case, tracked.

wdn• 5 years ago

We already have enough regulations and we still have so much problems. For one thing, it is selective enforcement. Secondly, the penalty is peanut. If penalty is a percentage of total revenue, it will change the behavior of the executive of the tech giant. Add some jail time for repeating offenders is a good idea too.

Lastly, the reason why regulations don’t work is regulations is written by lobbyists here in the US. Guess who these lobbyists represented?

bogomipz• 5 years ago

Indeed. Nearly every cell carrier in the US was selling their customer's data. See:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...

goatinaboat• 5 years ago

Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking.

In fact it does the opposite. People with a demonstrated willingness to pay for stuff are more lucrative to track.

aloisdg• 5 years ago

As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.

Not if the project is a non-profit. Wikipedia is free and privacy friendly (or pay what you want through donation if you want).

wayne• 5 years ago

My views similarly changed on email. It would have been inconceivable for me to pay for email 10 years ago. Now I'm happy to pay for a service that does the basics well, is primarily considering my interests, and will have competent customer service if something goes wrong.

JMTQp8lwXL• 5 years ago

What if it's less profitable to run a paid search engine? Will they run both free/paid side-by-side? And how can one be certain they won't profit off the query data on the backend anyways?

Is there any reason I should think Brave won't prioritize profit motives first in 5, 10 years when investors or markets expect returns?

hoolihan• 5 years ago

Paid services have the real name and credit card. It's too risky to assume they won't turn evil in the future.

I barely trust my ISP.

xtracto• 5 years ago

Back in the day (late 90s) there was a company called Copernic that had a good search engine with a REALLY good desktop client. I remember being able to do all sort of filters, sorting and crazy searches. IIRC It was paid, and it was really way ahead of the simple search operations you can even currently do with Google (actually, Google has constantly removed search abilities as time goes by, like for example, anyone remember when Google Search could show tweeter search results? or that you could "block" domains from search results)

Bjartr• 5 years ago

On that last point, searches like `-site:example.com` looks like they still work.

SiempreViernes2• 5 years ago

Honestly, there should be some sort of never-forget meme about Google removing the + operator when they started up their stupid social network that failed and then never put it back >:(

Just checked wikipedia, and it seems it'll be ten years ago this June that google stole + and forced quoting upon us for pure vanity reasons.

eznzt• 5 years ago

So basically a search engine that is worse than Google and that I will have to pay for. Sign me right up!!

tylersmith• 5 years ago

I've really 180'd on this over the past two years. I've always loved business models that allowed free access, but now I'm very much focused on a business models that are sustainable, and without relying on being able to sell my data to keep the lights on. A service I can pay for access, in a sustainable business arrangement, is my new preferred model.

solso4• 5 years ago

There was no tracking on Cliqz, nor it will be any in Brave. To know more about the underlying tech of Cliqz there are interesting posts at https://0x65.dev, some of them covering how signals are collected, data, but no tracking. I did work at Cliqz and now I work at Brave. I can tell for a fact, that all data was, is and will be, record-unlinkable. That means that no-one, not me, not the government, not the ad department can reconstruct a session with your activity. Again, there is no tracking, full anonymity, Brave would not do it any other way.

wizzwizz44• 5 years ago

Please let us know if that changes.

Brave buying Cliqz is the first corporate acquisition that's actually made me feel better about the acquirer, ever. I have no idea how to react to that. Keeping up the dev blog would probably make me start recommending Brave, where before I recommended against it.

Incidentally, do you know what's happening to the Cliqz browser?

michaelbrave• 5 years ago

give me the option to block certain sites from results and prioritize others, I would pay a monthly fee just for that level of customization. I hate searching to download something and only finding spam in the top 5 results.

Seb-C• 5 years ago

I was going to say something similar.

I'm convinced that it's possible to build a better search engine than Google by using community-influenced results, rather than try to do magic.

I'd definitely pay for a search engine where we can collectively downvote to hell any SEO spam. That would be the only way to incentivize sites to provide actual quality rather than cheating the algorithms.

IgorPartola• 5 years ago

Consider that it’s not just the changing times but also your own changing economic situation. Would you have had a spare $20/month foe a search engine subscription as a 16 year old? I sure had better uses for my money back then than something like this, privacy be damned.

jcpham22• 5 years ago

bat tokens will eventually make sense to everyone we’re probably just 10 years too early into the private browsing space

boogies2• 5 years ago

I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for.

Right now you can pay to host an instance of the internet meta-search engine SearX: https://searx.github.io/searx/

glitchc• 5 years ago

Cable in the 1980s comes to mind:

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

Short answer: Yes, there will be ads eventually, even if you pay for it.

addicted• 5 years ago

I do think that fewer things need to be free. But there’s no reason to believe that free means we must lose our privacy.

OTA television, for example, had been providing decades worth of extremely expensive programming for free. And this lost us absolutely no privacy.

There is no reason that ads have to invade our privacy. They can go back to targeting based on broad geographical and age demographics.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say the government passes a law that says that ads cannot be based on any factors more privacy invasive than your zip code and 10 year age range. It’s not like companies would stop paying for ads. They would pay less, but probably still enough to maintain free services, like Google did in its initial days.

asddubs2• 5 years ago

there's also lots of smaller niche platforms/services that don't, sometimes even funded exclusively by donations. I think the size of the organization has a lot to do with the likelihood that your data is getting harvested as well.

jcims• 5 years ago

I don't really even want to think what I would pay Google to access their search engine if they made it a paid service tomorrow.

asddubs2• 5 years ago

i would probably just switch to bing or duckduckgo (aka bing) at this point. google used to be unparalleled in finding what you're actually looking for but their search results have steadily been getting worse.

bogwog2• 5 years ago

I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there.

I wonder if that's because they're using Bing search results rather than crawling the web themselves?

hlava• 5 years ago

have you heard of greed? Do you think they care about loosing customers in that scenario? Where will they go? Dont be soo naive... they might start with honest and clean intentions but that will most likely change, or the pople running the company will change, people are soo easily corupted, especialy in a world filled with vice

1vuio0pswjnm72• 5 years ago

I would not get too excited until you read the agreement they present you with. If you are a paying customer and they make promises, such as privacy-related ones, then those could theoretically be enforceable, with quantifiable damages at least equal to what you have paid. Will they accept that potential liability. Google won't. If Brave breaks their privacy promises to millions of paying end users, will they try to prevent the possibility of class-actions when potentially hundreds, maybe thousands or more of them all simultaneously "ask for their money back". Does paying by itself magically transform empty promises into kept ones What if the promisor can break the promise and keep the payments.

stjohnswarts3• 5 years ago

I don't really mind the ads on search engine as long as they aren't tracked and are based on the search. This is the way startpage does it.

partiallypro• 5 years ago

It's still kinda not private, because GTM/GA/ etc on 3rd party sites are going to track where your click came from.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

We block all those. Were you thinking of other browsers?

jojobas• 5 years ago

Many things are free, such as Linux kernel and Debian distro.

However if someone's expenses grow with userbase, everything you said is right.

anonytrary• 5 years ago

As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.

Paid is still centralized. Decentralization isn't an answer, because people make their own decisions and a collective decision contains a lot of power. The only way to achieve true decentralization is to eliminate communication entirely. I believe it is referred to "Babel's tower". Centralization means we have no freedom and no privacy. With decentralization, 51% could conspire to murder the 49%. That experiment, taken after a few iterations, would quickly turn us extinct.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

The idea is interesting. My view on the economics side is that the flaw is that this is a for profit company trying something new to make more profit. There's nothing wrong with that except that what they are selling is a commodity (bing, google, duck duck go, ..).

So, that doesn't sound like a sound plan. In fact it sounds a lot like everything Mozilla tried and failed to make money with in the last few years. Maybe users will pay for X .... nope they won't pay for X either. Ironically, Mozilla's main business remains reselling Google's search.

What's Brave's business model at this point? I'm assuming that the attention token business is at this point not really delivering substantial revenue.

Anyway, a couple of weaknesses here with both these business models (search and BAT):

- They are tied to Brave the browser, which while popular has a tiny market share. So, both solutions are cut off from the vast majority of users, including the fraction of a percent likely to be an early adopter of this (i.e. by actually paying). Fractions of fractions don't add up to a whole lot of revenue.

- That browser happens to be built by Google and also depended upon by Apple & Microsoft (i.e. Chromium). Between those three, they control access to most of the users via their apps stores and operating systems. They also control the main contenders Cliqz is supposed to compete with: Google, Bing & DDG (which is Bing). That sounds like an uncomfortable place to be as a would be competitor. Also, there's the Apple and Google tax to worry about with any kind of revenue: Brave users putting more cash in the coffers of Apple and Google basically.

- Users might pay for quality. That raises the question how you will get that. DDG is popular but a key reason for people to not use it remains that sometimes they just aren't good enough. And it's basically Bing, which depends on MS putting loads of cash and resources in it. I found myself reaching for Google a lot in the half year I used it until ultimately I decided that I did not have time for too many fruitless searches where I wasted time before ending up finding what I needed on Google. I reverted back to Google. And that's not because I enjoy being tracked or in their clutches: they are just that good.

- Brave as a walled garden for exclusive paid features does not make sense: it's too small. Both BAT and search as commercially offered features would have more users (and thus paying users) if they weren't tied to Brave the browser. IMHO both would actually need to be structured under a non profit organization for long term success (for users, not for Brave).

ChrisRR• 5 years ago

My opinion has definitely changed over the last 10 years from I'll use anything if it's free, to I'm willing to pay for a better service.

Spotify is something I'll gladly pay for because it just works and is less hassle than ads and playlists and searching for youtube videos.

csunbird• 5 years ago

I would like to say, paying customers have even more valuable tracking data, since it signals that you have good disposable income.

Kaze404• 5 years ago

Excited to see how long it takes for them to be outed on yet another controversy, say it was "accidental" and rollback on this new service. Their MO is pretty clear at this point.

kmos• 5 years ago

I am good with ecosia.org ;-)

ThePhysicist3• 5 years ago

In my understanding what Cliqz did, at least in the beginning, was to buy clickstream data and then build an index on top of that. So in a sense they just scraped Googles' search index, as almost all users rely on Google for finding stuff on the web. The clickstream data gives you both the search query and the website(s) users visit after searching, so it's pretty easy to build a search index from that, at least for popular searches (it might be more difficult for the long tail of search queries).

A lot of the clickstream data you can buy comes from browser extensions btw, and often gets collected without users knowing about it (looking at you, "Web of Trust"). I think their reliance on such data was the reason Cliqz acquired Ghostery, which also collects a copious amount of "anonymous" data from its users. On one hand it's a neat idea since you're basically standing on Googles' shoulders, on the other hand it's at least questionable for a "privacy-first" company as the generation of the search index is based on personal data mined from (often unwitting) users.

That said I don't know how their system evolved, so maybe today they have another way to build their index.

sytse• 5 years ago

Bing might have also done this to improve their index https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...

pastrami_panda2• 5 years ago

That's one side of it. The ironic thing is they probably used exactly the same tactic as the search engine in the article:

https://www.quora.com/Did-Bing-intentionally-copy-Googles-se...

samstave3• 5 years ago

As mentioned in my previous comment:

There is a better way to service users interests; initially it was "keywords" - but now it can be more structured;

"I want to learn [topic]" and the response may be a step-by-step how-to on how to learn [topic]

TBH this was a subject addressed on NPR this morning.. People staying at home are talking about the old infra of edu where people cant be in person - but nobody is talking about the opportunity on changing the structure of learning at all - there should be seen the opportunity on changing the way in which we learn something.

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

I work at Ghostery. Yes, Cliqz bought Ghostery for the Human Web data, since we have so many more users than Cliqz ever did. What gives you the impression that any data we are collecting is not appropriately anonymous?

The Ghostery extension is open source, so feel free to link to anything in the code that looks suspect to you

ThePhysicist3• 5 years ago

I'm not saying it's not anonymous, just that it's impossible to assert the anonymity.

Also, I saw a lot of "anonymous" clickstream data offered by other companies, which was often trivial to de-anonymize. We did a DEF CON 25 talk about it, just google "Dark Data DEF CON 25". Robustly anonymizing high-dimensional data like user clickstreams is practically impossible, and often knowing a combination of 4-7 websites a user regularly visits is enough to identify him/her in a pool of millions of users (see the talk for details), so I'm highly doubtful about any company that claims it can robustly anonymize such data. If you're confident your data is anonymous why not release a large sample and have researchers look at it?

So while I'm not saying Ghostery is also doing that I don't have a lot of good faith in these data collection practices in general (also, I think before Cliqz acquired Ghostery it collected a lot of data like cookies from the users). Again, it's a smart way to collect data but I wouldn't call it very privacy-friendly.

atombender• 5 years ago

Cliqz seemed like a very promising search engine [1], so I'm glad that they've found a new home where they can try again.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200501194956/https://cliqz.com...

onli• 5 years ago

It really worked quite well, especially when compared against ddg. Fantastic that it will survive in some form and that the work was not for nothing.

imwillofficial7• 5 years ago

Brave has earned the trust and respect of the community by fixing several high profile bugs. They have also dinged themselves by pushing their crypto ad system. How will this pan out?

"We'll see" said the zen master.

smaryjerry2• 5 years ago

The crypto ad system is their best feature. You get browser ads instead of website specific ads and so any website can get money simply from users using brave. Also you can choose which websites get some of your specific ad money. It feels more like the money being made off of you is also being spent by you. Taking power away from big tech.

imwillofficial7• 5 years ago

I feel that ads are a terrible way to pay for stuff. I think the future is paying for stuff I use, directly.

imwillofficial7• 5 years ago

"The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option..."

This is the future of services on the internet. The 'cult of free' should die off as people realize they don't want to be bought and sold like digital cattle.

fullstop2• 5 years ago

I wonder if payment in BAT will be an option?

elwell2• 5 years ago

Probably, but you'll probably have to KYC as well...

mozey• 5 years ago

payment in BAT

payment in Basic Attention Token... isn't that exactly how the Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc advertising business models work. BAT is basically a reward for watching adds right?

I like the idea of paying my content producers directly better, see for example https://coil.com. Cut out the middleman

pier255• 5 years ago

The SaaS project I'm working on won't have a free tier. We think it's unfair to make paying customers support free customers.

ketamine__7• 5 years ago

Does the customer on the $40 plan think it unfair he pays for more resources than the customer on the $20 plan?

jay_kyburz• 5 years ago

As long as your crusade against free doesn't impact our free public libraries, free healthcare, free education.

(All of which are not really free because we pay for them with taxes. )

imwillofficial7• 5 years ago

I have been developing a simple mantra: Pay for stuff I use. Mostly software so far. As far as “free stuff” provided by the government, I feel there is a baseline that a government should provide, as that should be their purpose. Where that line is, and what services are provided is a source of intense debate. “Pay for stuff I use” is a great starting point, but hardly a hard and fast rule.

fouc• 5 years ago

The Brave browser already has tracking itself, so even if the search engine doesn't..

jonathansampson2• 5 years ago

The browser does not track users. What have you seen to suggest otherwise? Any data? It's fairly trivial to examine the network activity of a browser, as Leith has done at https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf, and determine to what degree (if at all) it is tracking a user.

mind_half_full• 5 years ago

sadfev• 5 years ago

Brendan Eich is doing some very important work. I hope this succeeds!

Imnimo• 5 years ago

Goggles sounds cool at first, but it's very hard for me to imagine goggles that I'd be interested in actually using. Maybe clever people will come up with something awesome, but the fact that I can't come up with an example that I would want is a bit of an alarm bell.

pkamb3• 5 years ago

Remove Pinterest results, remove Quora, remove blogspam...

joubert• 5 years ago

Love the audacity of building back better multiple dimensions of our internet experience.

However:

end the debate about search engine bias by turning search result output over to a community-run filtering system called Goggles

Not sure why something "community-run" would automatically/necessarily solve bias... So looking forward to deeper thinking by the Brave team.

nige123• 5 years ago

A way to compete with Google is to leverage user's search trails in the browser - by recording the click paths on Google (and other search engines).

Recording and intersecting search trails is covered by this patent:

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2005069161A1

The rationale is here:

https://www.jinfo.com/go/blog/2505

pmurt7• 5 years ago

There was this wonderful podcast featuring Eich a few days ago:

"Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE

not_knuth• 5 years ago

There was quite a discussion on HN about the podcast joined by Brendan Eich himself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131043

ignoramous• 5 years ago

Excited that Brave is playing a pioneering role here with leveraging cryptocurrencies and distributed tech (including Web3) who's time, it looks like, will come. It helps that a Browser is close to a perfect environment from which to challenge the incumbents heavily dependent on ad revenues.

Brave Search's index there will be informed the activities of participating Brave users, in terms of the URLs they search for or click on, and adjacent web resources that don't require extensive crawling.

This is quite similar to Amazon's now-defunct A9.com which, iirc, had some form of hybrid search engine that was built on search / ad results from Google and the data Amazon collected via the Alexa toolbar.

The Brave Search team has written a paper explaining its use of the term, titled "GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web." The browser upstart aims to replace the tyranny of Google's inscrutable, authoritative index with a multiverse of indices defined by anyone with the inclination to do so.

Again, very similar to WAIS. Has Eich been speaking to Brewster Kahle? :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server

ketamine__7• 5 years ago

It's very exciting. So far Brave is not so popular in the cryptocurrency space compared to its peers. That will change I'm sure.

KirillPanov3• 5 years ago

Brave is not so popular in the cryptocurrency space compared to its peers.

KYC-hostage demands from a company that claims to be "privacy focused"...

https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/1065594144796610560

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

No, I haven't been talking with Brewster. The Goggles paper is from the Tailcat team.

kapsteur• 5 years ago

The Cliqz Tech blog : https://0x65.dev contains many informations about how their constructed their private search engine

mrvenkman3• 5 years ago

Competing with Google is going to be difficult. I have a question: What is the consensus on forwarding any search "terms" to Google and then "scraping" the results back into the user - sort of a "proxy" search.

I mean - Google built their business on searching the internet, why can't there be a business that starts by searching Google?

npteljes• 5 years ago

You mean like Startpage?

ehsankia4• 5 years ago

Forget Google, how are they gonna compete with DDG who has the "privacy conscious" market niche pretty well covered. That seems to be their main competitor here.

Having a semi-popular browser where they can set the default search engine would normally help, but if it's not free, I don't see why anyone would pay when, again, DDG does the same thing for free.

Let alone the rumors of Apple wanting to make its own search engine...

guerrilla2• 5 years ago

Even if it turns out to be better, my question is how are they practically going to onboard users like me (and the people I know.) Like I might try it out of curiosity because I saw it here on HN but I really doubt a lot of people care. DDG works fine for them.

lrae2• 5 years ago

Their own browser's users would probably just end up paying in their BAT tokens or be able to use it for free, as long as they have ad rewards program enabled in the browser.

leprechaun1066• 5 years ago

What is the consensus on forwarding any search "terms" to Google and then "scraping" the results back into the user - sort of a "proxy" search.

Isn't this what DuckDuckGo does but with Bing?

elwell2• 5 years ago

https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

mrvenkman3• 5 years ago

My understanding is that “DDG” have their own “web crawler”?

What I understand from your reply is that they don’t?

So if I search on Bing for a specific keyword, I will get the same results from DDG.

What about misspelled words? I have used DDG before.. for about two weeks. They offer poor suggestions for my misspelling.

What I’m suggesting is using Google results even after misspellings. What are the laws on scraping Google for suggestions/misspellings?

birdsbirdsbirds• 5 years ago

How do you continue once you are big enough to be a threat to Google?

kibwen• 5 years ago

It's good to see more competition in the search space, but I have to wonder: is Search really still the golden goose at Google? Between Android, Chrome, and YouTube, Google seems to have all the profiling data and all the eyeballs it could ever ask for. How wrong am I?

rank0• 5 years ago

Yes I believe search produces the lion's share of revenue for the company still. But yeah, all of their products/services work together to build a comprehensive dataset about the user.

izacus• 5 years ago

It's worth mentioning that Brave is also a browser which was silently replacing links in webpages for their affilate links to make a profit: https://decrypt.co/31522/crypto-brave-browser-redirect

I don't trust their promises.

f4302• 5 years ago

The fact that they raised money through ICO and issued coins on a dubious blockchain just compounds to the suspicion.

I am using Firefox and I trust Mozilla more than I trust Bravo.

christophergs• 5 years ago

Eich (Brave CEO) co-founded Mozilla, FYI

paulcarroty• 5 years ago

Firefox sends telemetry to Google servers: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html

seph-reed• 5 years ago

For whatever reason, this never bothered me. The service wasn't any worse for it, I didn't really feel taken advantage of... technically they were part of how I might have gotten to one of those links.

I guess there's the loss in privacy where it's known what browser I use, but that's not the kind of privacy loss that worries me.

They've got to pay the bills somehow, and while they should have been more up-front about doing it this way, and it is a breach of trust, it still landed in the realm of "reasonable asking for forgiveness" to me.

I don't trust their promises.

Maybe I'm just not seeing which promise it was that was broken so badly.

imiric• 5 years ago

Maybe I'm just not seeing which promise it was that was broken so badly.

The unspoken promise that web browsers should be impartial user agents that render the content as its authors intended, rather than man-in-the-middle agents that modify the content as they see fit.

The fact this change also benefitted Brave authors directly is an additional breach of trust.

Inexcusable in my opinion, and with the other shady cryptocurrency dealings mentioned in a sibling comment, it's enough for me to never want to use their browser or anything associated with them.

I appreciate they're trying to change the status quo of how the web works and is monetized today, but they started on the wrong foot and their reputation is forever tarnished in my eyes.

nicbou• 5 years ago

- It alters the content that is served to you. It violates the expectation that your browser is a neutral agent.

- It monetises the content created by other people. As someone who lives off the content I create, I'd take offence to that, particularly if it changes already monetised links.

mminer2378• 5 years ago

That's not true. It was never replacing links in webpages. It was redirecting if you typed the URL. Which, I would honestly be okay with. It's at no cost to me, and I understand Brave needs to make money. I could see how Binance would be upset, but not me myself. Virtually all browsers make money by search referrals, and I don't see how that would be different from my point-of-view. That seems extremely mild to me.

Also, when people got upset, Brave changed it too. It's not like they promised to never make money. I don't see that as a reason to trust Brave any less. It seems like a good influence on the web.

bhaile• 5 years ago

They did address it as an error on their part. [https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/06/09/brave-ceo-apolog...]

flatline• 5 years ago

"An error in judgment". That's kind of like, I'm sorry we got caught. The fact they thought something this was a good idea at all is telling.

jonathansampson2• 5 years ago

"...silently replacing links in webpages..."

That's incorrect. Brave added a feature to the browser which would list Affiliate Links, if any, in pre-search UI. As the user typed something into the address-bar (e.g. 'Bitcoin'), Brave (the browser) would check local data to see if there were any relevant affiliate links. If it found one, it would enumerate it among the other search suggestions in the address-bar dropdown.

Note, affiliate links were not inserted into pages. Links on pages were not modified. Requests en-route were not re-routed. There were many ways people described this feature; most of them were incorrect. So what was the problem?

Our implementation of this feature had a mistake; it matched against fully-qualified URLs. As such, if you typed 'binance.us' into your address bar, and Brave had an affiliate code for that domain (which would be visibly shown before the user navigates), the browser sent you to the affiliate link instead of the non-affiliate link.

When this issue was brought to our attention, we confirmed the (undesired) behavior, owned the mistake, fixed the issue, and confirmed that no revenue would be made from that affiliate link. Mistakes do happen in software, and they will happen with Brave (try as we might to avoid them). What's important is that we moved quickly, fixed the issue, and maintained transparency.

Traffic attribution is not uncommon in browsers though; open Firefox and type something in your address bar. When you hit Enter, you'll find that Firefox adds a traffic-attribution token to the URL too (although they do this only after the request is being issued; Brave showed the token before navigation).

I hope this helps provide a bit of context to a very misunderstood bug in Brave's past.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Do you think the BAT idea will turn out to be a better system in the end ? in a socially good way, people who want to contribute to society will have better data/incentives and users will have a less crowded time online.

jansan• 5 years ago

What I want to see in a search engine is this: An array of customizable buttons that you can select to hint at the type of search that you are doing. News, Technical, Shopping. Especially one to filter out all shopping related results.

For example, if I want to learn about a country, I do not want any travel related stuff in my search results. On the other hand, if I am looking for ideas for my next holidays, throw all the flight, hotel, beach infos about that country at me that you have.

Or give me a button that limits my search result to stackoverflow and stackexchange. Their own search engine sucks ass, so i have to rely on google (using "site:stackoverflow.com").

Give me this and a decent search results, and you have a paying customer.

penguin_booze• 5 years ago

Looks like Brendan is, in a sense, in the process of cloning Google, only in reverse order: browser, ads, and now search!

ketamine__7• 5 years ago

Dismantling the shit one turd at a time.

azinman2• 5 years ago

The Brave Search team acknowledges that not all filters will show results that are agreeable to everyone. "There will be Goggles created by creationists, anti-vaccination supporters or flat-earthers," the paper says. "However, the biases will be explicit, and therefore, the choice is a conscious one."

What could possibly go wrong?

m1117• 5 years ago

Why are people so hesitant of sharing their browsing information? I think it's physiological. I'm happy that there're algorithms that analyze my behavior. Google doesn't identify me personally, it just sees me as a behavioral pattern. But it's nice to have alternative approaches.

simplecto2• 5 years ago

Anyone building (or in this case, buying) a search engine takes a fight they cannot meaningfully make impact.

1. Privacy is a feature, not a platform. If the search engine cannot deliver better results than google or bing (a tall order) then there is no reason to use it no matter how private.

2. Google has a 20+ year head start and billions invested. You will not catch up playing the same game (eg - broad search). Google, for all its faults, is amazing technology. If you try to be a general search engine and compete I do not see a win.

3. Find another strategy, like BETTER search results within a niche. Curated by subject matter experts and enthusiasts.

4. Source your search results from trustworthy data sources. SEO has ruined search. Google setup the rules and the Black/Grey/Whitehat practitioners out-smartted them every step of the way. It is full of crappy data sources.

5. Curation, not scale is the key here. I don't see a win for Brave.

rel2thr• 5 years ago

You said it yourself that SEO has ruined search. That’s a HUGE advantage for a smaller search engine. The seo people aren’t going to spend their time targeting a small search engine. And they definitely won’t target it at the risk of hurting their Google rankings

simplecto2• 5 years ago

Exactly -- SEO is a non-starter if I get to curate what goes into the index in the first place. And for transparency-sake I would want to see what sites are indexed, as well as if any of them are "boosted" in rankings.

desireco42• 5 years ago

I am really impressed with Brave team work, they are spearheading work that pushes web forward, kind of what Mozilla was supposed to do.

I really love ipfs work they did and completely ready that not everything will pan out.

the__alchemist• 5 years ago

Matching the accuracy of Google results will be a challenge. It's remarkable how (at least for the topics I tend to search for) good the results are compared to every alternative (Bing, DDG etc). I made a search tool that filters, modifies, resorts, and adds to results from Bing's API. I no longer use it, because the base Bing results (This applies to everything else I've tried too) aren't on the same level as Google's.

marshmallow_123• 5 years ago

i find that google drive me towards certain websites. This ruins my user experience. They also omit many websites.

kiwijamo2• 5 years ago

That's interesting cos on the few occassions I've accidentally used Google (e.g. when searching on someone else's device) I've been surprised by how bad Google is nowdays. I have the same experience when I set up a new device for myself. I'll be like "Wow these results are unusually bad... Oh wait this is Google, let's change the default search engine to DDG now. Let's try again, ah that's much better!" Pretty much the only Google property I still fall back onto every now and then is Maps but even there OSM is improving all the time.

qwertox• 5 years ago

I don't feel that good about this.

The thing is that Cliqz was "majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media" [1], and that "The deal, terms undisclosed, makes Cliqz owner Hubert Burda Media a Brave shareholder." [2]

Doesn't Hubert Burda Media have a interest in removing ad-blocking technologies from the web? Couldn't partnering with Brave get them into a privileged position where they are capable of displaying ads and build user profiles?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz [2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_e...

hellotomyrars2• 5 years ago

If so that makes sense as Brave is happy to show you "ethical ads” instead of the ads already on a page if you so choose and reward you and the original content creator(maybe) with their very own funny money.

mminer2378• 5 years ago

When you sign up as a BAT publisher, you choose what currency to get paid in. It's just as easy to pick USD, and then it will auto-convert the BAT to dollars, and you would hardly even know it involves crypto. It's not some ponzi scheme.

MikusR• 5 years ago

Mozilla was sending your browser history to Cliqz in Germany. https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

solso4• 5 years ago

Mozilla never did such a thing. The browsing history was never sent in any shape or form. As the journalistic article you quote states, Mozilla put in place the HumanWeb[1,2,3], which was a privacy preserving data collection which ensured record-unlinkability, hence no session or history. Anonymity was guaranteed and the framework was extensively tested by privacy researchers from both Cliqz and Mozilla. Disclaimer: I worked at Cliqz.

[1]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm... [2]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-data-i... [3]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network-hpn...

a254613e2• 5 years ago

https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.

a254613e2• 5 years ago

Yup. As far as I'm concerned cliqz (and mozilla) completely lost my trust with that spyware.

Modified installers, randomly served to customers with no notification, opt-out by default, and sending full browser history to random servers is just too much for me to ever trust them that they have my privacy interests as their goal.

jcpham22• 5 years ago

I still don’t understand basic attention token, but I know people that do understand it and I support them!

mminer2378• 5 years ago

Instead of showing ads on websites, Brave blocks them and has an option to show you ads from the browser itself. If you elect to see these ads, it will pay the revenue from the ads to the websites you use or designate. It uses a cryptocurrency called BAT as the medium of transferring funds.

samstave3• 5 years ago

I use BRave exclusively on both my machines and my mobile devices.

I have one request within brave:

I want "Use Profiles" a switchable profile that states what I am using Brave for - and session states.

So let me explain:

1. I am using brave to do personal browsing at home and thus my 30 open tabs are related to my personal browsing etc.

A cool way of implementing this would be instead of CTRL+SHIFT+N would be CTRL+SHIFT+N[1-9] to shift to VIEW and would take me to that tab-stack... and there would be a page that would allow me to manage each tab-stack around [TOPIC] - Meta Book marks...

2. Educational tabs (bookmarks) associated with learning something - so I want tab grouping/session grouping around the resources I read for learning a topic

3. Work topics - so a group of resources related to work.

4. To sum up the above, basically VIEWS that I can dictate what bookmarks, sites, resources, etc relate to which view.

Kind of like multiple desktops - I want sep viewing environs that allow me to group, classify and segment knowledge tunnels... and overlap them as desired.

Love Brave.

digitalbase• 5 years ago

I use 1tab for this. works in Brave and Chrome

pkamb3• 5 years ago

I would love a search engine that searched mainly only Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, Twitter, Flickr, and Reddit.

Google results are currently awful, full of blogspam and Pinterest-mirrored images. I don't remember when this changed.

samstave3• 5 years ago

A search funnel would be an interesting thing (does this exist?) whereby you whitelist "only give me results from these resources" - and where 'resources' can include the whitelists of others that you trust or have subscribed to.

Basically you could have a search engine that only replies with information from whom are also of the same interest as you - or people you congenially follow etc...

So you could say " show me everything about X" and the results are only from those who are actually connected to X in some way - based on the interest subscription graph as opposed to a keyword graph...

I may be a moron on this subject - but I do recog that there is room for improvement...

I added the following to a previous comment:

*"A cool way of implementing this would be instead of CTRL+SHIFT+N would be CTRL+SHIFT+N[1-9] to shift to VIEW and would take me to that tab-stack... and there would be a page that would allow me to manage each tab-stack around [TOPIC] - Meta Book marks..."*

mminer2378• 5 years ago

I mean, you can search only those sites with Google.

Just add:

  (site:stackoverflow.com OR site:superuser.com OR site:serverfault.com OR site:stackexchange.com OR site:twitter.com OR site:flickr.com OR site:reddit.com)

You could make your browser do that automatically.

https://www.google.com/search?q=(site%3Astackoverflow.com+OR...

pkamb3• 5 years ago

I'd rather give my business to a search engine with good defaults.

And I don't want only those big sites. I'd also like to see authored blogs, traditional forums, national newspapers, various wikis, etc.

gidam• 5 years ago

Brave has a long way to go to build real trust. Too many reckless stuff: hijacking links, suspicious url-rewriting, crypto-token stunts, forgetting to communicate with users about serious privacy leaks with their faulty TOR window... also it looks like they care about privacy only in their PR brochures.

lrae2• 5 years ago

Also zero transparency for users and publishers.

On one browser installation I stopped getting payouts, reached out to them via reddit (like they asked for) and provided all the information they asked for: ghosted.

I'm also a publisher, for weeks now I can't login and it seems like I'm not getting payouts anymore either. Never got any mail about it. Sent them an email about it February 23rd, no answer so far.

If I'd have to guess, the one client somehow got blacklisted maybe because I used too many Brave installations and they think they're fraudulent? (Though I only used like 5, Brave & Brave Beta each on a desktop & laptop, then on another desktop just one installation. Also, I still get payouts for the other installations.) Or it's just another one of the bugs that eats payouts and users' BATs.

Publisher account I even have less of an idea, it's totally fine, teen-rated gaming websites with a couple of thousand organic (search traffic) uniques/month. I did sent BAT from my unconnected Browsers (you only can connect a maximum of 4 browsers to a wallet, ever) to my site to tip myself. As far as I know that isn't against the TOS either (even makes them more money because they douple dip).

But, even if they don't suspend you without any notice, it's completely non-transparent as a publisher too. You get zero statistics, just a bundled payout each month. I'd never use them like this as a publisher for bigger sites, pretty sure I mailed them about that too in the past and also did not get any reply.

junon2• 5 years ago

Also the fact that they boast "we blocked X many ads" directly above a Brave-owned embedded avertisement directly in the browser itself.

Scummy stuff.

smbullet2• 5 years ago

That's a feature, not a bug. The point of the Brave ad blocker is to (optionally) replace unethical ads with ethical ones so you can compensate the content creators you browse. How is this scummy?

jeanofthedead• 5 years ago

You can easily remove cards, top sites, adblock counts, and advertisements from the Brave home page. It's customizable.

techrat2• 5 years ago

You forgot one. Whitelisting cross-site trackers from sites like Facebook and Twitter.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

All browsers allow those social widgets by default, because blocking them breaks too many pages. Brave is not alone in this regard. We're working on a better default that blocks but replaces with mock objects bundled with Brave's binary that activate the real widget on click. In the mean time, you can turn them off and risk broken pages via "Social media blocking" settings.

JacobSuperslav2• 5 years ago

Also doesn't help that Brave's CEO is a right wing guy (asked to leave Mozilla because of his radical comments) and a COVID conspiracy theorist "masks don't do anything"

danans2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what the relevance of it either way. Even though he left Mozilla due to his public opposition to marriage-equality for same-sex couples, to connect that with his current company seems like a stretch.

And even being an anti-masker in the COVID19 context, however misguided that might be, isn't really related to the browser's functionality.

stjohnswarts3• 5 years ago

His politics are irrelevant to me. I use firefox 95% of the time but when websites just don't cooperate with it I'll use Brave as a chrome fill in.

kdtsh• 5 years ago

Agreed. I just don’t see why I should not continue to use Firefox, Multi-Account Containers, and DuckDuckGo, and just use Tor Browser if I want to use TOR.

The whole crypto thing in Brave especially rubs me the wrong way, it feels like a Ponzi scheme.

permo-w• 5 years ago

It’s chrome with extra features, and not owned by Google. You don’t have to participate in their crypto nonsense, and you don’t have to use their TOR browser

It’s basically just convenient

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

The only recklessness in sight is your comment repeating a complete fabrication. We never "hijacked links". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25841456.

The Tor leak was already fixed in Brave Nightly when independently discovered. We were fixing as part of a HackerOne bug report, which per standard practice is not disclosed until patched in all releases. The mistake there was not forgetting to disclose, it was not airlifting the fix into Brave Stable and intermediate releases right away. We have already made process fixes; automated network leak testing is the biggest one.

If you don't like crypto-tokens, don't use them. They're optional in Brave. They have no privacy impact.

ShakeRattleRoll• 5 years ago

Cliqz’s Human Web used servers from FoxyProxy to remove IP address info. Will you continue to partner with FoxyProxy (as a matter of outsourcing the “trust us, we’re not tracking your IP”) component? If not FoxyProxy, then who — this 3rd party companies’ reputation matters.

mancerayder• 5 years ago

Coincidence? https://seekingalpha.com/news/3668882-google-wont-sell-ads-b...

bluecalm• 5 years ago

Using brave for more than a year now on my phone I sometimes forget how terrible mobile browsing is for most people. The only thing that reminds me is when I sometimes open a website in Chrome.

If the trend of paid search engines or browsers start I am buying. Ads and tracking are cancer of modern life. It's literally offering free stuff to make your life worse in exchange. It's "I will give you this item if you let me punch you in the face" kind of deal.

I can't wait to support a company that collects money for their software and uses part of it to fight the cancer.

crorella• 5 years ago

“What if we could give customers a button. They’d press it at the end of the year and it would automagically file their taxes for them.”

This is exactly how it works in Chile, you pretty much check the numbers and make sure they match with your figures and done. For free.

kiwijamo2• 5 years ago

Are you posting in the right thread?

chanmad29• 5 years ago

Are there any brave users out there? no pun. I use ff with DDG on PC and safari with DDG on ios. Never understood the reason for a move. The ad rewards was just too much information for me, from brave.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

See https://brave.com/transparency for our growth to date and other stats.

The ad system is off by default, AKA opt-in. Did you hear otherwise?

CodeGlitch2• 5 years ago

I've recently moved to Brave because of their addition of IPS (which I see as an interesting technology). I've been really happy with Brave - especially on Mobile which feel way snappier.

Also not having to install a 3rd pary ad blocker (uBlock Origin) makes me feel more comfortable. Firefox should ship with a good ad blocker - it does not.

I've not played around with BAT yet - it's on my TODO list.

Brave seems to be pushing the boundaries more than other browsers, and it'll be interesting to watch where things go.

CodeGlitch2• 5 years ago

Obv meant IPFS

pier255• 5 years ago

Switched to Brave about 6 months ago on macOS, iOS, Android, and Windows. Very happy with it.

desmap• 5 years ago

@Brendan, well done! There's some way to go but I like the direction you took, in particular the concept of "goggles". When will you release the first beta?

e-clinton• 5 years ago

Headline two years from now: “Brave apologizes for breaking their promise on search and tracking users anyways. Promises to do better.”

layoutIfNeeded• 5 years ago

Cliqz? Wasn’t that the company behind that Firefox scandal with the Mr. Robot ads?

noobquestion81• 5 years ago

Glad someone is pursuing this model. I am doing well enough that its absolutely worth it to me to pay my way out of the “proliferation of personal data” game.

Thinking on it I had an amusing thought: I wonder if there will ever be a google premium :) All tracking, no ads.

inthewoods• 5 years ago

I keep waiting for Apple to introduce their own search engine. They are already pushing on the privacy angle, so it would seem to make logical sense to dump Google and have their own search engine. I think switching the iPhone/Safari search engine to their own search would be devastating to Google.

Basically, they would be doing a similar strategy that Microsoft used against Netscape. As I remember it, in the MSFT/Netscape case, they gave away IE and the web server, crippling Netscape's ability to make money. MSFT didn't have to make money off either as they made money off the OS.

In this case, ads are the core of Google revenue. Apple, however, doesn't need to care about that (yes, it would be a loss in revenue). So they dump Google and Google loses a major source of revenue and data.

Obviously there would be some anti-trust issues - I assume that's what is holding them back.

sidibe• 5 years ago

If making a search engine like Google was easy to do Apple, Microsoft or Amazon would have done it long ago. Of any of these Apple is the worst position to do it since they don't have the same scale of infrastructure as the others.

shruthibadri• 5 years ago

Doesn't Microsoft already have Bing?

logicchains• 5 years ago

If making a search engine like Google was easy to do Apple, Microsoft or Amazon would have done it long ago.

Microsoft did: https://www.bing.com/.

jakequade• 5 years ago

Brave is still based on Chromium, and Google is the opposite of "no tracking, no profiling".

I'll stick to Firefox + DDG, thanks.

BrendanEich26• 5 years ago

Are you worried about tracking in the Chromium code? If so please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-....

Otherwise if you are worried about engine monoculture, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26337402.

If neither of these is the issue, what is?

forlorn• 5 years ago

And hence no profit?

rognjen• 5 years ago

I think without profiling search results would be worse.

Searching for "cucumber" means something very different to me and my dad for instance. Without profiling both of us get worse results.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

Quote: " If you don't market it, you can lose to somebody who just puts privacy perfume on a pig and tells you it smells great and tastes delicious."

Well, pigs are tasty in the first place. Secondly, this plays on the assumption that pigs are filthy animals, which is very wrong. They like water, they like to get wet precisely because they like to be clean from parasites on skin. The fact that they do this in mud is because how humans are raising them in small filthy enclave. Given the choice, pigs will go and bathe in clean water, not mud. Or go ask any hunter to tell if they saw wild boars that are full of mud instead of actually being clean.

proxyforce• 5 years ago

After a long period of relative dominance by a single provider, there’s recently been a lot of interesting things happening in the search space. Specifically around privacy, there are multiple projects and companies working to offer us control how (and whether) our search activity is captured and monetized. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch — companies providing search services need to monetize SOMEHOW, and I think that’s the key thing to pay attention to when evaluating new services.

Brave’s approach seems to be to straddle the line a bit between free and paid — the article says there will be an option to pay for a completely ad-free version of the Brave Search service, while also having a free option that is ad supported (albeit via the unique BAT model).

It’s exciting to see these types of services starting to become available. Competition and user choice in search is a good thing for everyone involved.

Disclaimer: I work at Neeva[1], a subscription based never-any-ads search engine. These opinions are my own.

[1] https://www.neeva.com

Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling

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