pythux

> Recently our development team had a small break in our feature delivery schedule. Technical leadership decided that this time would be best spent splitting our monolithic architecture into microservices.

Maybe redesigning the architecture of the product just because there is time vs. there is a pain point/problem that needs solving is already a red flag. In this context it feels like “micro services” was a hammer looking for a nail, and they had no such nail.

Edit: typo

“ There is no meaningful switching cost to using a new search engine.”

Unfortunately, defaults matter and Google is spending billions of dollars yearly to make sure they are the default search engine wherever they can. Most people don’t switch from default.

I used it a lot and it usually works great. Of course there are corner cases but if you don’t need to handle them in most cases I don’t think it means you should never use the library in the first place.

I think this is missing one of the most important points. Even if Manifest v3 was able to provide everything content blockers need today, it would still be bad. Why? Because blocking ads and tracking is a never ending race and content blockers are continuously adding new mechanisms to detect and block ads/trackers.

Manifest v3 declarative APIs are a snapshot of what is good enough today (although not quiet yet…), but will very soon be out-dated. Manifest v2, given the huge flexibility provided by its APIs, is a much better platform for innovation and adaptation in this regard.

With manifest v2, browsers are a platform and allow extensions developers to innovate and build powerful new features (some of which were not imagined before, and sometimes end up being implemented by browsers later on). It’s good for users and it’s good for browser vendors. With manifest v3, Google decides that that the status quo today is good enough, forever, and we do not need new things in the future (or at least not unless they decide to implement them in Chrome themselves).

You can check exactly which fraction of the results were fetched from Brave's index vs. third-parties using the "independence score" found in the setting drawers (opening can be done with the cog icon at the top right of any page on search.brave.com). There is there a global and personalized score of independence (respectively aggregated on all user's and for your queries only).

Explanation is also found here with screenshots: https://search.brave.com/help/independence

This is not correct. Brave Search owns its own (growing) index and relies on third-parties like Bing for some fraction of the requests. Which is not the same thing as relying fully on Bing or third-parties for results like so many meta-search engines. More detailed answer here: https://search.brave.com/help/independence

Edit: Forgot to say that I work on Brave Search.

Unless I missed it, I assume the article is talking about the Chrome implementation of IndexedDB. As far as I know the performance issue with their implementation vs. say, Firefox’ one is a known issue[1].

Other comments mention using batch operations to speed-up IDB but maybe Chrome could also fix their implementation in the first place. It seems, though, that the Chrome team had no intention on improving the write performance of IDB as of 2019[2].

Edit: it seems that Chrome team did improve the performance of IDB since 2019 but it is still not at Firefox level of performance.

[1] https://dev.to/skhmt/why-are-indexeddb-operations-significan... [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102545...

Brave browser does not block first-party ads by default so it should not be contradictory. If a user decides to enable aggressive mode of Shield then fist-party ads are blocked as well.

I found this to be pretty comprehensive (not sure if this is the final release note, though): https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/a5ac2f45ff84a688a094...

Hey, Brave Search is currently hosted in the US (I am assuming you are on another country) and latencies will be bigger in other places. We will scale in the future, which should improve speed.

Regarding number of pages of results, please see my answer on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27597911

TL;DR: we currently show the equivalent of 2 pages of results and will consider more in the future.

Hey, we are planning on implementing something very similar to what you describe. You can read more about our proposal here: https://brave.com/goggles

In a nutshell, community-curated lists of rules to deeply change the way our core ranking algorithm surface content and influence the results you see for a given query.

Hey, have you tried bangs on Brave Search? Lots of them should already work out of the box, if not, please let us know!

We use our own independent index.

"Cliqz tailcat" is an independent index and we rely on third-parties like Bing for a small portion of requests where we are not confident enough (although we would be able to serve 99% of the requests, users expect the best quality). For the long answer you can read here: https://search-dev.brave.com/help/independence

We are actually planning to implement just that! You can read more about our proposal here: https://brave.com/goggles/

Thanks! We'll have a look at this one. This is definitely broken.

Not to be nitpicking, but we actually show up to 20 results (not counting infobox, videos, news, places, instance answer, etc.) in a single page, which would correspond to 2 pages of other search engines (they usually show up to 10 results per page).

The idea is that most people will never go beyond first or (very rarely) second page. And as said in another comment, if you did not find what you were looking for in the top 20 results, changes are you will not find it in following results.

We do have plans for a feature which would allow community-based alterations of our core ranking algorithm which might help here. You can read about it here: https://brave.com/goggles/

Disclaimer: I work on Brave Search.

Fixed now! Not a hug of death (yet).

There is an official version hosted on Brave's website (and linked from the announcement): https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf

Blocking by hostnames is a big part of adblocking, but if you want to really block all ads and also not break the Web, you need an in-browser tech to do things like element hiding, scriptlet injections, etc. Which cannot be done via host files.

> [...] but they also do their own modifications to the rankings, which is sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

Could you maybe share a reference for this?

Ecosia explicitly specifies "Results from Microsoft" on every results page, so they seem pretty transparent there. I don't think DuckDuckGo and Qwant are as upfront about that.

The main barrier to enter the search market is not tech, it's money: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-...

And of course there are lots of other issues. For example the Web is very hostile when you are not Google Bot (i.e. there are a lot of big sites that will forbid you from crawling their content, unless you are Google, or Bing).

I am far from expert in this but I am not sure I would be comfortable automatically configuring all my apps to run through Firejail using firecfg (if only because in case of breakage it would be harder to understand where it is coming from).

In my workflow, I keep things mostly manual and configure each app I want to sandbox explicitly by creating a shortcut (usually I create a "launcher" in /usr/local/bin so that it takes priority over whatever is in /usr/bin). Here is the one I have for Firefox as an example in "/usr/local/bin/firefox":

firejail --profile=/etc/firejail/firefox.profile --private=~/.sandboxes/firefox/ /usr/bin/firefox --no-remote $@

In terms of risks, are you mostly concerned about security risks? Or breakage?

I am far from being an expert but I think that:

1. Is solved by most profiles which will only give access to files required by the given app so it would not get access to all content of the home folder. And even better (although not default behavior), is to use --private to isolate each app into its own fake home folder.

2. Is also not default but seems to be possible according to official wiki: https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide/

I have been using Firejail for a few years now and absolutely love it. It is now a central part of my setup and workflows. Here are two features I use regularly:

- The "virtual home" specified with --private=/path/to/folder runs the app with the specified folder as a home folder. I use this for all the apps I sandbox to make sure my real home does not get polluted by tens of config files, cache, etc. Removing all traces of an app is now as easy as deleting /path/to/folder; I find this pretty neat to keep my home folder organized (each app gets its own home in ~/.sandboxes/<app name>).

- Starting an app with --private (without any argument) will run it into a temporary/disposable home folder which will be cleaned up when the app is stopped. I use it to run some apps I don't really trust and don't need persistence for (e.g. I start Chrome with this option so that I get a fresh home, hence profile, every time I need it, same for Zoom when I need to join a meeting---not very often).

And of course all the profiles that are built-in to customize the sandboxing to most popular apps is great!

I'm really thankful for the work being done on this project.

This. Since you mention Cliqz, this article might be relevant: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-...

Google spends billions to secure its position, which makes it virtually impossible for new companies to enter the market.

> This isn't a scalable solution.

I am not sure what your point is.

> If the value per ad decreases, services will need to display more til the user generates enough value to support the costs they incur.

What they need to do is to find a way to pay their bills. If ads allow them to do that then it's great (maybe non-personalized work well enough? Or contextual targeting, as others have suggested in this thread). If users cannot stand the increasing amount of ads then they will stop using their service. Or maybe these companies can adopt a mixed model where people can pay to not see the super intrusive ads, and everyone else gets the ads?

I would probably always pick non-personalized, as my assumption is that the less relevant they are, the easiest it would become for me to ignore them (assuming they are not more intrusive than the personalized ones).