Brave Search passes 2.5B queries, allows users to choose search rankings
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Brave Search Goggles: Alter search rankings with rules and filters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837986 - June 2022 (45 comments)
I do not remember every story that has been posted about Brave since its inception. I always remember my emotional takeaway, which is that I don’t trust it.
My fuzzy memory on it is: something about brokering my private data, which I never want shared period, something about optimizing my relationship with ads which I want nothing to do with, something about a crypto scam.
You don't anything to do with ads? Just don't sign up to the rewards system. It's opt-in.
The "crypto scam"? What part of it is a scam, if at no point users are required to put any money or buy anything to participate? It is also opt-in, and the token exists mostly because it is the only way possible for them to pay users their share of revenues anywhere in the world without having to become a money transmitter themselves.
It's still an Ethereum based coin, so there's other options but as far as cryptocurrencies go, it's far and away among the least scammy ones I've seen. Most others are either blatant scams or their value is entirely based on speculation.
That's not a convincing rebuttal. A scam with a "free-to-play" tier is still a scam. Lots of carnies will let you play their scam game for free a few times, letting you get into the game for free is a popular trick for scammers.
With respect to Brave's thing specifically, it doesn't really seem like a scam to me. But I don't blame people for thinking it's a scam. If you reflexively call anything remotely related to cryptocurrencies a scam, you'll be right more often than not. It may not always be accurate 100% of the time, but it's a very good heuristic. If Brave wants to use a cryptocurrency and not be considered a scam, they have their work cut out for them. That's just the way it is.
There could be a downside for the advertisers, if they were being forced to buy the token to place the ads, but even that is not possible, because the ad campaigns are priced and paid in USD.
You are encouraging people to "think" something that you personally know not to be true.
IOW, you are not encouraging them to "think" anything. You are just feeding them a conclusion, and you are spreading a lie.
You might believe that is a white lie, but it's a lie nonetheless. Worse still, it's the type of lie that, if repeated often enough, damages all the reputation from honest people and destroys all chance of good work coming from the space. The lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You can do better than that. I am not telling you to do a 180 in your opinion, or to support any crypto project in particular. But at the very least, stop feeding people with the conclusion and actually state the principles behind your reasoning.
Heuristics and "rules of thumb" help when there is uncertainty and when there is risk associated with a decision, but before applying an heuristic you can and should remove as much uncertainty as possible.
I am encouraging people to think something I believe to be true 99.99% of the time. It's called a generalization, and it's normal.
"Leave snakes alone." Most snakes aren't venomous, but some of them are. Just leave them all alone and you don't have to worry about which is which. Most snakes aren't venomous, but most cryptocurrencies are. Cryptocurrencies are much worse than snakes.
There is another word for it: prejudice.
> Most snakes aren't venomous, but most cryptocurrencies are.
Non-venomous snakes are not going to benefit from people touching them. There is no downside for the non-venomous snake if it is considered dangerous. It's actually an upside: lots of non-venomous snakes evolved to look like the dangerous ones because that gives them protection without forcing them to spend energy producing venom.
This is not true for people working in cryptocurrencies. Honest people need to be recognized as honest. If they are lumped together with scammers, they can not do their job. It's bad for them, and it's bad for those could've benefited from their work, but were (wrongly) scared due to prejudice.
You are not harming a snake by making a bad judgment call regarding its danger. You are harming honest people by making a bad judgment call over their work and their nature.
And it is working. 50M MAU and 100% YoY growth is nothing to sneeze at.
Oh, and then Firefox works just fine, too. Worst it has is... a builtin bookmark service? Oh, the humanity!
Just for perspective: Firefox is at barely 200M MAU, and declining every year.
Also, I'd really like to know what browser is being used by those complaining over "unethical behavior". Unless you are using Ungoogled Chromium or Vivaldi, your choice is almost certainly from an organization with a considerably longer "history of doing unethical things". Yes, Mozilla included.
My personal theory is that people don’t like Brandon Eich because of the prop8 stuff from 10 years ago and throw shade for other reasons.
This seems to follow the playbook of “I don’t like you for a reason I don’t want to talk about so I’ll find something to criticize even if it is illogical.”
Firefox is ~200M MAU and declining.
As much as I loathe modern Mozilla's attitude towards doing things, people do hold them to an impossible standard. Browser development has to be paid for some way, and a thing like Pocket is a genuinely useful add-on service.
> As much as I loathe modern Mozilla's attitude towards doing things, people do hold them to an impossible standard.
And it's worse for Brave, because a lot of the arguments that people use against them are not even true.
The trouble with Mozilla/Firefox is that their ostensible supporters want the org to live on donations and are hostile to useful value adds like Pocket.
There's no evidence that they'd do any better than their competitors over time. But some people seem to have a default ideological preference for Brave, similar to how many are theoretically opposed to "Big Tech" but suddenly don't seem to have a problem if Elon Musk were to become the replacement Zuckerberg.
I have absolutely NOTHING to back up that feeling, but I'm profusely against using any of their products.
Brave is now my default recommendation to “normies” as it’s easiest to set up and reduce the Bonnard of ads and it doesn’t track you.
I used to recommend Firefox but it’s huge and bloated and isn’t as easy to use any more.
It’s funny because it seems your social network is a bit weird if you have such a limited intersection of Brave+Qnuts.
Interestingly, I don’t know a single person irl who is a “qnut” (or at least admits it to me) but I know lots of sysadmin types with a decent chunk who use Brave. Probably 50% are “de googling.”
Also, as much as I dislike ads I think web3/crypto grifting is worse. I feel ambivalent =\.
I’m curious to read how Goggles is architected technically. Allowing anyone to create their own defacto index seems intractable with Google level performance.
Where do you think the money comes from? At least Bing gave people legit cash.
I’m perfectly happy with ads in magazines. I don’t like ads based on my search history that follow me from pc to phone to Alexa to tv to other PCs.
I super briefly skimmed the crypto (BAT) token stuff. I think the general idea of earning tokens for searching and browsing is neat, but the way they're trying to use it directly as a microtransaction currency isn't super innovative.
I don't like crypto in general, but I think the "proof of idle capacity" tokens have stumbled onto something that could be valuable for online reputation because they invert economies of scale in a way.
Take something like Chia (XCH) as an example. As a typical user I can allocate some idle storage space to mining and, as long as I only mine while I'm browsing the internet, the incremental cost to me is basically $0. Compare that to someone building a rig specifically for mining. They have costs, I don't.
Assume I can opt in by plotting some proofs on idle storage and mining into a pool where rewards are split up and some of the rewards (aka tokens) can only be used for liking (ranking up) or disliking (ranking down) websites. Ex: 20% of your rewards go to the pool operator (search index), 5% can be donated directly to sites or creators you like, and 75% go to ranking (search reputation) which "burns" them. Adjust the ratios as needed.
A million normal users with 10GB of spare storage cancels out 10PB of storage from bad actors trying to game the system. IE: What's free for the masses is expensive to game and the more users hate your site, the more expensive it is for you to game the results. If you never give users "real" money (aka redeemable tokens) as rewards there's not much incentive to buy storage just to "earn" crypto currency, so hopefully you'd keep it limited to using truly idle resources only.
The search index (ex: Brave) could use the tokens as a currency for selling ads (ie: keywords) and that could be weighted by the reputation score of the site you're driving traffic to. In other words, the effectiveness of your ad buys is impacted by your existing reputation and if you have a site that everyone hates you'll eventually get to the point where ads for your keywords cost significantly more than competitors that are well liked.
Now everyone on Hacker News can tell me why that's a dumb idea :-) Lol.
> I think the general idea of earning tokens for searching and browsing is neat, but the way they're trying to use it directly as a microtransaction currency isn't super innovative.
Micropayments have never worked before. There's hope in the future if the network effect is strong we'll be able to pay a little bit of BAT for one NY Times article, etc.
They complained that the ads they're getting aren't interesting and are just in general crap.
Yeah, that's what the web was like before advertisers could go "hey, if you have people interested in X show them this ad".
a) don't own the device b) the device is very low performance, or has no local storage c) accessing via the web d) don't have enough data allowance for the much larger overhead to download
Now, those problems will go away eventually, but to say that on-device ad targeting is a panacea for all ignores the majority of internet users around the world today.
You can have something that works like pi-hole and also manages ad inventory, runs the algorithm for ad-matching, checks if there is any kind of notification that you might be interested, etc, etc... all without having your personal data leaving your home.
It's the people in the west where the companies make the most profit.
If the larger share of the consumers start rejecting companies that base their businesses on exploiting user data, advertisers are not going to say "oh, now we can only in India", they are going to say "we still need to find ways to reach customers. If our customers are using only privacy-focused ad networks, we are going to be there as well."
Also the number of bots has exploded, that must account for some of the searches.
I can't take a browser serious when there are conflict of interset especially monetary ones in promoting it in public.
Yes, its extremely annoying, and I do not trust anyone saying positive things about Brave or its other product offerings. Brave is a shady company that:
>puts profits over privacy
>impersonates well known influencers to sell their products without their knowledge
>constantly pushes their cryptocurrency, functionality completely unrelated to web browsing and of negative value to anyone caring about their privacy
>their search results appear to be based off of google, despite claiming an independent index. all of your queries may just be going to google anyways
>the browser frequently sends telemetry to their servers
>they have consistently added more spyware to the browser unless users en masse call them out, which only happens some of the time
I don't think for a second you are being downvoted by real hacker news users. Brave has created some sort of native marketing arm or something that drowns out any criticisms with vague positive comments like "I've been using brave search, more privacy and better search results than google!". Something is truly fishy about Brave, and I refuse to go anywhere near their products.
As for valuing profits over privacy - I was just reading an old Scott Alexander post on inconsistent rigor. Do you apply this standard to everything? You don't work with any company that values profits over privacy? Or, perhaps, when you dislike a company do you bring out strong criticism that would equally impeach almost every other company you do business with?
Brave is a good browser and a decent search engine. I use the search about 60/40 with Google and I hope that grows over time.
Since we're indulging in conspiracy theories here, I'll just throw out that mine is that you have ideological motives to dislike Brave and those motivate your criticism. Which is fine, I have ideological reasons to dislike Google, I just don't pretend that Google services are bad.
Are you Brave's native marketing arm at work? When I open up wireshark and I see telemetry sent back to Brave after I open the browser, must be a conspiracy right?
I find it funny that you did not even try to refute the points about them impersonating people to sell their products or the telemetry in their browser. You instead deflected into a combination of "whatabout-ism" and then say the same vague positive statements "Brave is a good browser and a decent search engine."
I think Brave is shady, explain to me why they are not using technical merit. I will fully admit that I may not know all the facts, and I'm willing to hear you out, so explain why they impersonate people to sell their product.
>Do you apply this standard to everything?
Yes, if a company markets one thing, I expect them to deliver on that marketing promise. Brave markets privacy, and they do not deliver.
>I'll just throw out that mine is that you have ideological motives to dislike Brave and those motivate your criticism.
Explain further. What is my motivation here? That I'm tired of the Brave spam? That I want a browser that is actually private, like Librewolf or Ungoogled Chromium?
Maybe Brave telemetry is reporting stuff I don't care about - time spent in the browser, number of tabs open, crashes, etc. Maybe Brave telemetry is secretly smuggling data I do care about and they are using that for nefarious purposes. I would rather deal with occasionally being stung by the latter than spend my time worrying about it and restricting myself to open source, carefully audited, minimal risk tools.
As far as impersonating people to sell their products, I don't really know what you mean. I'm guessing it's something about them creating profiles to receive BAT tokens on their behalf until such time as those people joined the Brave ecosystem (if they do). I see this as a "growth hack" and maybe distasteful but not a deal breaker.
all of the developers i've interacted with at brave have also been pretty chill
there's not as much news about other browsers here because they aren't doing much newsworthy, like this article growing a search engine
“- sent from Google Chrome”
And its still the most private consumer grade browser out there
>impersonates well known influencers to sell their products without their knowledge
That's has been fixed, it affected the minority as crypto is disabled by default on brave.
>their search results appear to be based off of google, despite claiming an independent index. all of your queries may just be going to google anyways
If you have spent maybe 5 minutes using Brave search, you would see the difference, while Google is filled with stupid SEO spam, Brave has a forums section front and center.
And matching Google's index is a very very good thing, brave search is already better than DDG and probably also bing.
People want google results with better privacy.
>the browser frequently sends telemetry to their servers
Compared to what ?
Have you compared their telemetry to any other browser ?
Their telemetry is less than Firefox for sure.
>they have consistently added more spyware to the browser unless users en masse call them out, which only happens some of the time
Like what?, what is your definition of spyware?
> I don't think for a second you are being downvoted by real hacker news users. Brave has created some sort of native marketing arm or something that drowns out any criticisms with vague positive comments like "I've been using brave search, more privacy and better search results than google!".
This is just ridiculous, Because people like a browser which has actual privacy protections by default, an independent search engine, and an alternative ad network(that is disabled by default), they are bots or paid shells!
There is no one doing effective things to protect privacy in a friendly way like brave into the browser space, call me when Mozilla dares to block Ads or create a search engine, what they do is just increase the CEO salary while firing engineers, and then go on a political rant about fake news.
All other browsers require tweaks and changes, while with brave from your first click you are more private, I can give it to my grandma and she would be more private by just using it.
"We got caught doing something shady and fixed it" has been used a number of times by Brave. That's not a good look for a team that's presenting themselves as the white knights of the internet. Why would they be doing that shady stuff in the first place?
It should be disclosed that this site is ran by a Brave employee and many choices are influenced by how Brave handles certain things. Regardless of that fact, I have a lot of problems with how are privacy-respecting features presented on this site, clearly amplifying one way of looking at things.
For example the site completely omits the most important test of a privacy respecting browser - is it zero telemetry by default or not. This is where browser privacy begins.
Or a 'privacy' test filtering __s query param (which Brave incidently filters). I would totally use a param like __s in my early dev days.
We need an independent, 3rd party, privacy tests alternative.
I do hope to include telemetry tests in the future.
>All other browsers require tweaks and changes, while with brave from your first click you are more private, I can give it to my grandma and she would be more private by just using it.
100% false. Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf have zero telemetry. Brave has telemetry built in. Librewolf also comes with adblock built in, no tweaks required at all. Why should I use Brave over Ungoogled Chromium or Librewolf? Why are you defending a browser that is _not private by default_ when community-driven, conflict of interest free browsers exist?
Ungoogled chromium doesn't have ad block by default, and its default options are extreme.
Librwolf is even worse than UG, they disable WebGL, IPv6, WebRTC, Sync, and many other options that will break many websites, and you can't even change these options without a manual override file!
It really unusable for any normal consumer, even as an advanced user i don't use them, hardened Firefox is extremely slow, and UG doesn't have sync or advanced privacy protections from Brave like De-amp and Emphermal storage.
If I had to fuss with it, that would be a negative for Brave; but it's basically irrelevant.
How do you think Brave makes money?
No, because I don't judge individual comments based on what handle is attached to it. If you make a shitty comment, it's a shitty comment no matter if you're pro/against cryptocurrencies. And if it's good, it's good, no matter previous stances.
If four people say "I love Brave! It's awesome", and those four people are:
1. A new user just registered today
2. A long-time user who mostly talks about the Linux kernel and SQL optimizations
3. A long-time user who mostly talks about privacy and the search engine market
4. A long-time user who mostly talks about crypto
then that's four very different comments.
Obviously we can talk about the merits of Brave here and ignore the standard one liners.
Sometimes it is, but in this case it's actually an hacker newsworthy innovation.
> Everytime I look at comments its the same handles who are also pro-crypto
I'm 100% not into crypto. I don't like it's environmental impact and I'm not sure it will hold value long term. That said, it is an area where a lot of really smart people are trying to solve big problems... and maybe something of great utility will emerge.
> I can't take a browser serious when there are conflict of interset especially monetary ones in promoting it in public
I'm not sure what you mean here. Brave makes money by doing something other than either asking for donations (Mozilla), advertising (Mozilla, Chrome) or selling your data to whoever (lots of smaller browser companies)? Brave's interest in Crypto is a little strange, but the have made a great product, they are actively innovating, and their browser is really a better chrome than the original.
That's not correct. Brave is explicitly an advertising company. Their whole schtick is that they nuke nasty ads that track you, and fund their projects with revenue from ads they serve via separate channels that don't track you.
You could ask the same question in respect to something like VSCode, Github or Kubernetes. It's fine, just skip the news and comments about stuff you don't care about.
What browsers do you think suffer from that?
Brave is up front about how it's monetized. Browsers like FireFox that get their revenue from Google Search referrals, not so much.
Only one browser recently has been serious about implementing protocols and features that are beneficial to the user, not companies.
So while Chrome mulls blocking adblockers, Brave has one built in.
How many other browsers have Tor, Webtorrent, ENS, IPFS support?
Uhhh, do you just mean things that you specifically care about? Because I consider DNS-over-HTTPS, site isolation, multi-account containers, scipt-blocking, etc. all to be features that were beneficial to users.
>How many other browsers have Tor, Webtorrent, ENS, IPFS support?
I personally don't want Tor, Webtorrent, ENS, or IPFS to be in my browser, nor other cryptocurrency stuff to be near my browser. This is not as much of a selling point as you make it out to be, at least for some users.
I'm not really for or against Brave, but you're presenting your argument as if it is fact; everything you said is entirely opinion.
I mean implementing ALL useful technologies, the ones you mentioned, the ones I mentioned, not just the ones that don't threaten the moat.
There seems to be a pattern in the mainstream browsers to ignore the P2P tech for reasons ;)
> I personally don't want Tor, Webtorrent, ENS, or IPFS to be in my browser, nor other cryptocurrency stuff to be near my browser. This is not as much of a selling point as you make it out to be, at least for some users.
That's fine! But there are very valid use-cases for streaming torrents, for accessing onion sites, for ENS domain lookups, and accessing IPFS content.
Just because you personally don't want or need them doesn't mean others don't. I'm glad Brave gives the option and ability to easily access these technologies.
> I'm not really for or against Brave, but you're presenting your argument as if it is fact; everything you said is entirely opinion.
I mainly annotated browser monetization & adblocking policies and listed tech in Brave not in other browsers. Please be specific on your criticism and I will address it.
Its probably most of brave's users, as crypto is disabled by default.
I'm not a fan or user of Brave yet I don't consider a story every other day or so to be excessive.
Excited to see it grow and improve!
That’s quite an endorsement. I went ahead and added Brave Search to xSearch (an iPhone/iPad Safari extension that gives you keyword SE selection) to give it the college try.
Recently however I have been using Kagi and I think I have found the one search engine that is better than google.
It has been great in every query, allows a ton of customization of ranking, and the people behind it make the Orion browser as well which has been my main driver.
I wish companies wouldn't try to make something seem big by using "billions". It took me billions of nanoseconds to write this comment...
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
[2]: https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/business-essentia...
You could guesstimate DAU from qps by choosing a "queries per day" number (e.g., 10?) and assume the queries are done over just 8 hours. That's 1.25 queries per hour per user. Multiplying these terms out, you get ~500k DAU.
Billions of searches per year is just a weird metric that obscures what you'd actually want to know.
Now I only switch to Google Search once in a while.
DuckDuckGo, Qwant and similar search engines never give me so good results.
It's their deep financial ties to Microsoft thats worrying. And it seems they're willing to turn their back on privacy when Microsoft asks.
Is it me or does the description not match the bullet? To me 'transparency' would be 'we detail on this page exactly how we bias/filter/downrank results (except where legally required not to)'.
Second point somewhat implicit in the first: how can a search engine be said not to bias/filter/downrank results? That's the whole job? I think what they mean is they have some generic algorithm, and there's no special casing going on to further political or social ideals etc.?
Circling back to the first - I think you can even do that (if you want) and claim transparency, you just have to say 'we aggressively downrank anything to do with XY rights' or whatever, and it might not be what everyone wants but it will be transparent?
When I try brave I estimate it's one impedence-mismatch a day. Not a bad product but reports of googles demise are overstated.
As a comparison, DDG did 35B queries last year.
[0]: https://skai.io/monday-morning-metrics-daily-searches-on-goo...!
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/microsoft...
Because I don't see anything "revealing" about that situation, other than that DDG suffered from Bings error, as they use Bing's results. What did this incident reveal specifically about DDG?
Might have been obvious to those who knew where they got their index from, but it was certainly highlighted by that event.
Non Amp link-https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/microsoft...
Which sounds like a brilliant idea until one remembers the clusterfuck of censoring pandemic-related disinformation which transformed into a witch hunt of everything which didn’t match the mainstream political opinion.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
https://www.pcmag.com/news/duckduckgo-to-down-rank-sites-ass...
Presumably, they're also upset that search engines downrank penis enlargement ads, and machine generated stack overflow copy pastes.
One reason I like Brave (and Vivaldi for that matter) is that their team understand that their job is to build a tool - a good browser. The team members themselves have political stances that they don't leave a secret, but insofar as the organizations have politics, those are politics related to making a browser, politics of privacy and of more user control.
They have different philosophies on how to do that, but both companies understand their job is to make hammers for people to hit nails with. Other things they as individuals believe are not very related to their jobs as hammersmiths, so they leave it out. This is increasingly rare nowadays, and very much worth supporting, IMO.
This feature seems pretty incredible for searching specific domains. I'm excited for it.
Has anyone compared Neeva to Brave? Better/worse?
However note that awful misleading trendline they added to their chart.
> We’re excited to announce the long-awaited beta release of an innovative new Brave Search feature: Goggles. Goggles will enable anyone, or any community of people, to create sets of rules and filters to constrain the searchable space and / or alter the ordering of search results. Anyone could then choose to apply a Goggle—or extend it—to their view of Brave Search results. Essentially, Goggles will act as a re-ranking option on top of the Brave Search index.
Heck, just being not-Google is a bonus for many people.