Google Gets a New Rival as Brave Search Opens To the Public (cnet.com) 60
Brave, the maker of a popular ad blocking browser, opened on Tuesday a public beta of its privacy-focused search engine, a first step in creating a product that could compete with market titan Google. From a report: Unlike other new search engines, which generally repackage results from Google and Microsoft's Bing, Brave is building an independent index of the web. (Brave Search will rely on Bing in some areas, like images, where its own results aren't yet good enough.) Initially, Brave Search won't show ads -- the chief way that Google monetizes its search results. Later, it'll offer free, ad-supported search and a paid option with no ads.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Abuse of personal information for money? (Score:2)
Barely possible that was justified anonymity, but more likely you're feeding a troll who hoped to start a food fight. Turns out I'm actually interested in the issue, and even have an angle on it that involves nations, but I'm still changing the Subject...
But first I can say what I'm actually hoping to learn from this discussion before going off on one of my typical tangents. I've been looking at Brave for a while now, but I still can't understand how the alternative financial model (with its very own crypto
Crowded market (Score:5, Informative)
Doesnt DuckDuckGo already have pretty good brand recognition as a privacy-oriented search engine?
Re:Crowded market (Score:5, Insightful)
You call it "DDG". Bitching about the name is just about the lamest criticism I've heard. Do you think "Google" sounded very corporate in 1998?
Re: (Score:1)
Jesus, grow up will you? "Oh, look, FagFagFuck heeheeheeheee i'm so funny heeheeheee der der duuuuh...."
Re: (Score:3)
You're definitely being baited by a troll, but I'm going to return to your original thought and also apply your thought to solving the google problem, which hopefully overlaps with your pre-baited thinking. Which is also what the story is supposed to be about...
The objective should be to support freedom. That includes having a choice of search engines, where you should be able to choose by considering such criteria as how your personal information is handled and used. I think the way the rules of the game h
Re: (Score:2)
No one deploys a corp. search engine. I've never worked at a place that had an "official" search engine. You're just some triggered idiot that when cornered has to be a dbag.
Re: Crowded market (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Neither is "Google" nor "Bing". Sounds like a toddler at play.
Perhaps they can create a mirrored wrapper for it under a name like "SynergySearch.profit" so the suits are happy. It's kind of like GMC and Chevy: same car diff body.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to start a competing search engine called FagFagFuck. Gonna use it?
Sounds more LGBT-friendly than Brave, so it has that going for it :-P
Re: (Score:2)
And yet these c-level staff are perfectly fine referring to assembled product as ASSY in business documentation. I think they'll survive DuckDuckGo.
Re: Crowded market (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
And it works too. Have moved over to DDG 2 months or so because Google finally got too much on my nerve, and I think I have used Google once since. And that was just to compare frequency of a spelling variant by the overall counts. So not even a real Google search.
Re: (Score:3)
You want to escape Google? Paid email only costs a couple of bucks a month and it ensures that the provider actually has their priorities right. FastMail.com is my favorite.
Ditch Chrome. Firefox works fine. I don't understand all the hate for it.
Ditch Android too. Consider that a dumbphone maximizes your privacy (your carrier still tracks you, that is impossible to escape if you carry a cell phone at all). Do you REALLY need to be connected to the internet, via your phone, every minute of every day?
Re: Crowded market (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I still have to find anything for actual search DDG does not give me. Sure, eventually I will find something, but so what? Google is slowly becoming obsolete, and I think they know it. Their whole search engine serves only to target ads anyways, the user functionality is just to lure users in.
Google Needs To Be Taken Down a Huge Notch (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google Needs To Be Taken Down a Huge Notch (Score:5, Informative)
DDG does not use Google. [duckduckgo.com] and it does not personalize your search results based on search history.
The /. effect still works (Score:2)
Took 20 seconds to pull up the front page. Good luck.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, my ISP specifically slows just their site. Your theories fascinate me, please subscribe me to your newsletter.
(I hope they get it sorted out - competition is good)
Re: (Score:1)
me as well... /. effect hasn't been a thing for quite some time....
Yeah ... not yet (Score:4, Funny)
Their search results page uses some CSS malarkey so it does not render correctly in older/alternative browsers. /. denizens :)
If it doesn't work on Netscape 4 running on a old Unix workstation, it's not a good search engine for
Re: (Score:3)
Also, gopher://search.brave.com [brave.com] is not connecting ... Lame ...
Ugh (Score:4, Informative)
It has "results as you type" with apparently no way to disable it.
Re: (Score:2)
It has "results as you type" with apparently no way to disable it.
Perhaps this is more accurately described as predictions/suggestions as you type or autocomplete. In any case, I hate it and it's a waste of bandwidth and thought privacy...
Re: (Score:1)
Bing (Score:2)
Brave Search will rely on Bing in some areas, like images, where its own results aren't yet good enough
So Brave's not going to show any images of Tank Man [slashdot.org] either?
Brave Browser is garbage, won't trust their search (Score:5, Insightful)
So Brave Browser isn't worthy of trust.
- their ad blocking is just a port of uBlock origin, WITH A WHITELIST for twitter and facebook trackers.
- their Brave Rewards scheme is spammy and requires full disclosure of your identity if you want to get paid
- they snarf up telemetry and hit their partners referral apis constantly. You can't opt out.
- they silently install extensions
- they inject referral codes into URLs out of the blue
- they implement TOR but with a leaky DNS setup
Read more: https://ebin.city/~werwolf/pos... [ebin.city]
I think I'll keep using DuckDuckGo for search, thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for that.
Brave always irked me and I couldn't quite put my finger on it til now.
You win the internet today my friend....
Yo Grark
Re:Brave Browser is garbage, won't trust their sea (Score:4, Informative)
First item on the list:
their ad blocking is just a port of uBlock origin
This is false and has been for years. The ad blocker is not a "port" of uBlock Origin. It is a independent ad blocker integrated into the browser itself (not a plugin, in other words) with capabilities that can't be acheived with a mere plugin because Chrome limits what plugins are capable of. It is written in Rust. The source code is here [github.com]. A blog post from 2019 detailing the design is here [brave.com].
I haven't the time today to dispel the rest of this dreck. It's the usual, stupid anti-Brave FUD and misinformation that erupts at every mention of the browser.
Re: (Score:2)
There's an awful lot of questionable shit mentioned in the article, linking to further discussions all over the net. If one item is out of date, does that mean the whole list is FUD?
Hmm.
Re: (Score:1)
Here is some more patently false BS from your "article":
Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own.
Pure fiction. Brave blocks ads. It doesn't replace ads in a page with it's own. Brave's actual ads pop up separately — entirely separate and distinct — from any page.
These are easily falsifiable claims anyone that can fog a mirror can check for themselves. The author has supplied knuckleheads like you with a basket of BS and you're spreading it around like the little FUD muppets you are. Here [scss.tcd.ie] is some credible information about Brave
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with BAT is publishers can not opt out of it without jumping through hoops.
Here is a takedown of Brave by an actual publisher.
https://practicaltypography.co... [practicaltypography.com]
There's been progress (Score:3)
- their Brave Rewards scheme is spammy and requires full disclosure of your identity if you want to get paid
Brave Rewards is optional. The primary use case for spending BAT is to tip sites and content creators. No identity disclosure required. If you want to cash out BAT for USD, that's a different story (and more to do with compliance than Brave itself).
- they inject referral codes into URLs out of the blue
This was a bug, found and fixed [brave.com].
- they implement TOR but with a leaky DNS setup
Another bug, fixed a week after it was reported (5 releases ago).
Re: (Score:3)
Top edit in linked page:
Before reading my post, I must warn you. I’ve received a ton of responses on Reddit (I didn’t post it, but it got quite viral). And I’ve been proved wrong on some statements. So I have to check their facts and correct the post. Until I finnish that task, keep in mind that there are various mistakes. I’d also like to say that I wrote this to share it with my few friends on the Fediverse and somehow this went viral
So.. I may be full of shit, but I'll get back to you?
Re: (Score:2)
Brave devs have already responded to the points on that page, debunking many of the author's points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
It's fine if you don't like a browser, but at least have valid criticism.
Still puts Wikipedia at the top of results (Score:1)
Re:Still puts Wikipedia at the top of results (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia's often the most comprehensive result (it's reliability depends on the sources and editors) so it should definitely be there. I would really question any search engine that didn't put it near the top
Huh, it's actually... good? (Score:3)
Searched for images of pangolins, got images of pangolins.
Searched for a stock symbol, got a built-in stock price panel.
Searched for the weather, got a built-in weather forecast.
Searched for "planck keycaps" and got a bunch of links to sites selling keycaps for the Planck.
It's not much, but I'm still pretty impressed.
Re: (Score:3)
So the same business model just with worse results (Score:2)
"We don't use your data for ads, until later, when we do, unless you pay us". Solid innovation, that.
If you want to develop a privacy-preserving search, first build a business model that doesn't fundamentally depend on analyzing and farming out people's search history for whoring out to the ad industry. Until then, it's just different variations of the same nonsense.
You'd figure with all of the people and regulators interested in privacy these days, someone could come up with a business model for this space
Re: (Score:2)
The ads would probably be based on you current search, rather then you search history, so they wouldn't need to keep your search history.
The "unless you pay us" option isn't even available for most search sites.
Re: (Score:2)
"We don't use your data for ads, until later, when we do, unless you pay us". Solid innovation, that.
Well, yeah. If you're not paying directly, then you're paying some other way. That's how pretty much everything works on the Internet. No it's not innovative (who said it was?), but it is a welcome option.
will it block Tank Man ?? (Score:2)
Where's the revenue ? (Score:1)
Am I incorrect to think that Brave's business model is based on selling browsing data ?
Re: (Score:2)
Brave is its own ad network, built right into the browser itself. Also, you can get paid for seeing ads in Brave, which it pays out in its own cryptocurrency.
They seem to be trying to replicate the Google model, where you suck people in with freebies so that you can profile them and advertise to them. But I think their goal is to sell ads and they attempt to do that in an anonymous way. But their ad business can't work unless their advertising attribution works for their advertising customers - so they s
Re: (Score:2)
I tried Brave for a week and went back to Firefox. I just don't prefer the Chromium experience whether it's Chrome, Edge or whatever.
A search engine that is browser neutral, maybe.
Count me in! (Score:1)
I'm all for competition to Google and Microsoft (and all the giants tbh). I love DuckDuckGo for what it is and what it does but they do still rely on Microsoft and Apple for their indexing and location data. Hopefully Brave can make 'Search' about search again and instead about building shopper profiles on you (best case limited use) and trying to sell you crap.
Excited to see what Brave can offer.
subdomain (Score:2)
Why would you put your search engine on a subdomain? Its the hook to drive people to Brave browser. Which is the hook to drive people to Brave Ads.
Search results are quite good, actually (Score:2)
I tried a number of test queries and was actually impressed by the quality of the results and ranking.
It is definitely a search engine which I will use in the future, just for the quality of results and for getting a slightly different view on the content of the web.
Already better than DDG by a mile (Score:2)
I've been switching between StartPage (Google, but anonymous and with weird defaults), OneSearch (Verizon/Yahoo, but with privacy), and DDG (shit) for a while, but I'm already getting better results from Brave Search than I usually get there, which means I'll probably be switching to it for a while to see how it goes.
In terms of transparency/privacy, I'd much rather the source be open about how they plan to pay for their own operations, which Brave largely has been. There seems to be a lot of overwrought FU