It’s funny how brand reputation and impression works.
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.
The "brokering of data" is in-device. They don't get to access any of it.
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.
On top of this, as far as I know Brave gets the tokens they distribute to users by buying them from the open market with normal dollars they get from their normal advertising business. That is: There is always a buyer, so if you get tipped BAT you should be able to sell them if to no one else, then to Brave. Real ad dollars, to content creators by users tipping them.
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.
> What part of it is a scam, if at no point users are required to put any money or buy anything to participate?
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.
The point is that there is no "game". You opt-in for the ads, you receive the notification, you get paid for it. There is no downside for the users.
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.
I agree that Brave's thing is not a scam. Nevertheless, "all crypto is a scam" is a good rule of thumb that would do most people more good than harm. Generally speaking, I think people should be encouraged to think of all cryptocurrencies as scams. That's the advice I give to my family and any friends who ask.
> I think people should be encouraged to think of all cryptocurrencies as scams.
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.
> You are encouraging people to "think" something that you personally know not to be true.
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.
> 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.
At the same time, if Brave wants to market a browser while simultaneously promoting a technology that a huge amount of the populous dislikes, maybe they ought to review their priorities?
I've already blown my nose and moved on. Brave is a nothingburger, and if you disagree then you're welcome to spend the next 20 years of your life explaining to people what a Brave Browser is and why they need/don't need to enable advertisements so they can get paid fake monopoly money that they can turn into real money if they find someone else to buy it at a reasonable price.
Oh, and then Firefox works just fine, too. Worst it has is... a builtin bookmark service? Oh, the humanity!
Brave has a long history of doing unethical things. You covered some of them, another is the time they hijacked affiliate codes in URLs without disclosing it. They turned it off when they got caught and claimed it was a mistake. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...
A "long history" consisting of one data point where people immediately assumed malice without any chance of recourse.
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.
I don’t get the complaint either as Brave has really tight privacy and always had.
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.”
Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Mozilla have the advantage of many eyes on them. I may not trust them but they are known unknowns. Brave is niche and very much an unknown unknown to me. They are innovative, moving quickly, and don’t appear too concerned with their reputation (you could make the same case for Mozilla). Their “mistakes” look pretty bad to me and I don’t want the additional cognitive overhead of worrying about my browser.
I think Pocket is fine. People just want a browser project to be this pristine piece of perfection - open source, independent engine, donation funded, free to use - which just isn't realistic. I know, I used to be one of those people and raged about the Pocket inclusion.
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.
Personally, what bugged me about Mozilla was to see them closing down certain projects and teams (Persona and Rust come to mind) on the grounds of "needs to focus on what can bring revenue", yet the CEO was getting substantial pay raises.
> 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.
Yes and no. Brave detractors trot out the same false canards again and again, but Brave fans are fundamentally ok with them doing business.
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.
some people consider pocket, anonymous usage data, etc as deal breakers and "getting sold out" . I don't, but lots of privacy centric people want a browser with zero ads, self-promotion, or phoning home (for any reason) that isn't opt-in.
The point is that Brave, despite their short history, has already managed to demonstrate several instances of suspicious or potentially unethical behavior.
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.
Another recent incident was with them appending affiliate codes to specific crypto-related URLs by default. It was fixed after public outcry (the option still remains) at least, but I personally believe something like that shouldn't be in software at all, full stop.
The feature is basically meant to be like Firefox Suggest and give you a sponsored link in the dropdown, if you don't type in a proper URL. The bug that caused the outcry was typing in a proper URL resulting in the sponsored link being the first suggestion. Was fixed and the feature disabled by default.
The only people I've ever met that use brave are evangelical republicans who are basically Qnuts. I'd rather tailor my own version of chromium than use what Q suggested.
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.”
It's funny how powerful genuinely acting honorable and having a good reputation can be in a world where everyone seems to think you can get away with sociopathic behavior.
Good stuff, however comparisons to duck and Google for first billion users is misleading since internet use has exploded exponentially since last decade. You’d expect it to be easier to get more nominal use.
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.
> Also, as much as I dislike ads I think web3/crypto grifting is worse. I feel ambivalent =\.
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.
There have discussions of requiring staking BAT for advertising on Brave search. Probably won't happen because BAT is meant to be a utility token and this could piss off the regulators.
> 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.
To improve the personalization, they "just" need more diverse advertisers and work on their in-device algorithm. You don't need to give your data to Google or Facebook to get better ads.
The problem with in device ads is that they break down when you:
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.
Calling it "in-device" is just shorthand for "self-hosted".
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."
>Does anybody find the constant promotion of Brave on HN annoying?
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.
I use Brave. It's basically chrome with a built-in ad blocker. I have no experience of Brave "pushing" their cryptocurrency, which I don't use and not using it hasn't negatively impacted me in any way. I think I see an option for it on the "new tab" screen, but that's it.
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.
>Since we're indulging in conspiracy theories here
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?
When I was young I was stung by a scorpion that had been hiding in my dirty clothes. My father told me "This is why you should clean your room. The scorpions won't have so many places to hide." I told him that I would rather be stung by a scorpion once a year (or so) than do the ceaseless work of keeping my room clean. I feel the same about the kind of privacy concerns you are raising here.
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.
TBH most the concern is overblown - anonymous-ish (there's always something someone can do) be default and easy to toggle off and the source is aviaible
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
>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.
>>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.
"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?
I agree, it isn't perfect, but nothing really is.
Firefox has a unique key for every installer that can link people together, and runs Ads on the home page which is new (on brave its enable by default since brave ADs started)
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.
Hi -- I'm the maintainer of privacytests.org. To be clear, most of these tests were built before I applied to work for Brave. And I am committed to keeping the tests impartial.
I do hope to include telemetry tests in the future.
>And its still the most private consumer grade browser out there
>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?
I said consumer grade because I knew comments like this are coming.
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.
I love Brave and have commented positively about my experience with it in the past. But I’ve never owned crypto, and I don’t comment on it much (or positively) on HN or elsewhere. Just an N = 1, but I imagine I’m not alone.
By selling ads and services for normal money. The crypto is for the users to tip content creators with. Brave buys the crypto used to tip users with normal money ad revenue from the open market, as far as I know. That means the creators users gave tips inevitably have someone to sell their BAT to.
> Does anybody find the constant promotion of Brave on HN annoying? Everytime I look at comments its the same handles who are also pro-crypto
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.
A lot of users post comments about Brave that are inaccurate. They haven't done their research because "crypto is a ponzi" and learning about crypto would make them complicit or something. Unfortunately, this sort of attitude makes you lazy and stupid.
Obviously we can talk about the merits of Brave here and ignore the standard one liners.
> Does anybody find the constant promotion of Brave on HN annoying?
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.
> 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)?
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.
I mostly see people raging against Brave, not shilling for crypto. One of the main reasons I post in these threads is a bunch of unhinged stuff people spout nonstop that hasn't matched my experience using the browser at all. I pretty much just use it as a Chromium with better defaults and like that they're building their own search index. The tipping system seems interesting but I haven't bothered with it thus far. It's just a good browser, IME, from a team that understands their job is to make a good tool.
Honestly no. As I wrote in another comment I don't trust Brave, but I do like to follow along with their progress. Also it's nice to see that there a products out there that are trying new things and that they have people who are passionate about them.
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.
>Only one browser recently has been serious about implementing protocols and features that are beneficial to the user, not companies.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think there is a high interest factor on HN for competitors to google search. Brave isn't the only one that comes up. Some combination of google being frustrating for power users, increasingly evil in moral alignment, and obnoxiosly dominant in its role makes competition an interesting topic here.
Not really. I count about 19 stories about Brave in the past 30 days. Compare that with at minimum 33 stories related to just Google searches. That's not including non-search related threads about Chrome, Analytics, Maps, Alphabet etc. Otherwise it's hundreds of stories.
I'm not a fan or user of Brave yet I don't consider a story every other day or so to be excessive.
> it's been the best replacement for Google I've ever tried
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.
I did the same and i’ve had the override search engine option on for two months now to use it.
Using Google is a no for me (except really borderline situations), startpage is good but still based on google, ddg sucks and is totally unable to provide good results for my area. I can say Brave is already better than everything else except google and the search engines that use it. The “discussions” widget that shows reddit previews makes it sometimes better than everything else and this google feature will hopefully make it the best. I don’t really like the crypto stuff and many of the ideas that guide the making of the brave browser (so i don’t use it), however they have been shipping products that are simply very good lately.
I have tried using Brave Search (as well as DuckDuckGo) as alternatives to Google but I always had to keep switching back to using Google with the !g bang.
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.
Interesting so many separate search engines recently. Are they all primarily using Bing’s index? Otherwise it would have to be too hard to build up enough of an index and ranking system with how big the web is. Bing itself can’t keep up with the web like Google can.
To have something to compare the number with: DuckDuckGo's average seems to be around 1,100-1,200 qps. [1] For Google, it's estimated to be around 63,000 qps [2].
Google said in their last Zeitgeist (2012) that they served 1.2 trillion search queries that year, and in the same year they reported $30 billion revenue from their own sites. In 2021 they reported $150 billion in "Search & other" revenue which is categorically similar. In real dollars that's a quadrupling of traffic, so you can conclude they might have served 4-5 trillion queries in 2021.
Sorry, I should have been more clear: I just dislike the use of "billions!!!" when what should be discussed is either qps (system load) or daily-active users (engagement).
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.
How do you figure? They are making an argument that 2.5 billion searches isn't impressive, and Brave is framing it in "yearly searches" so they can use the word "billion" because it doesn't sound as impressive if you frame it in "searches per second".
I recently install Brave and when I used it for a few hours I didn't realise the default search engine is not Google! Only after a few 'quirkiness' results that I realised I used Brave Search.
Now I only switch to Google Search once in a while.
Google collects so many data it is difficult to beat, but i was impressed seeing that Brave Search is just miles better than ddg and has way less problems understanding which language i’m using and providing localised results (i’m not from the us)
Brave has a long way to go, but they results are sometimes better than Google on technical searches, which was the only reason I started using Google Search back in 2000.
I'm the same way... they still have some work to do, but there are plenty of spots that are better than google such as code snippets. Its my default search now
I think Brave Search is better than DuckDuckGo, especially when searching for "local" places. The only problem I have is that it's about twice as slow as DuckDuckGo at best, and about 5 times as slow at worst.
> Transparency: We don’t censor, bias, filter, or downrank results (unless legally required to)
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?
I understand that, I just wouldn't label it 'transparency' - it is transparent of them to say that, but so would be 'we explicitly editorialise our results to [...]'. I'd just call it 'bias-free' or something (though q.v. point two..).
Exactly. I’ve used ddg for more than a year and startpage for some months and it’s great to see a search engine that doesn’t suck, tries to be independent and has no problems understanding that i’m not from the us
Demise? Maybe not in the short term but I would argue Google is losing trust and that's a problem for any business small or large. When given the opportunity, I try to spend my time and money elsewhere.
Switched to Brave when DDG revealed its focus on politics. It has been a very pleasant transition, and I haven't missed the !g bang as much as anticipated. Turns out falling back to Google isn't needed nearly as often with Brave as it was with DDG.
How did DDG reveal its focus on politics? Are you referring to them dropping Yandex? Unfortunately there’s no good options in that situation because however good Yandex is, it basically gives the Russian government free reign to inject propaganda into search results, which is basically the opposite of being apolitical.
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?
It probably refers to DDG down-ranking so-called Russian disinformation.
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.
That was my number 1 concern about switching away from DDG. I put one into Brave for the hell of it, and was surprised that it worked. (!mdn, probably) That sold me on Brave.
They're upset because the Russian government got caught publishing disinformation in the US, and DDG announced they were going to downrank puppet sites.
Presumably, they're also upset that search engines downrank penis enlargement ads, and machine generated stack overflow copy pastes.
What does politics mean to you? Isn’t every entity covertly or overtly political? What is it about keeping those politics secret that you like so much? Or is it that you don’t like their politics?
Not everything is political, let alone heavily. I could be forging hammers, and in some sense it's a political choice to not sign Erika or L'Internationale at the top of my lungs, but that sort of definition of politics means everything, and is thus meaningless.
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.
I don't know why, but I had a very negative impression of Brave for a long time. I still haven't tried their browser, but the search is suprisingly good! It also uses their own web index, which I find to be very impressive.
I’ve been using Brave + Startpage for a few years on mobile. I couldn’t get used to DDG or other search engines. Adblocking is quite good but also catches legit some tooltips and modals.
i love brave, it has transformed search for me, and the results remind me of what Google felt like decades ago. I find stuff on brave that i never would find on google or duck duck go. For example, trying to buy some thuja "green giants" (a kind of tree for landscaping) uncovered dozens of mom and pop operations nationwide, plus the insights from their local websites, that are typically buried under 5 layers of SEO garbage on google.
I have been using Neeva for sometime, and I hardly miss Google. It allows me to add some specific webpages for my specific needs, so that I can see search results from general+specific websites. Reddit, I believe, is now indexed, and they should extend it to forums.
I use it with Ungoogled Chromium, although I have used Brave Browser in the past. I didn't switch off the Brave Browser for ideological reasons or anything, so I have no qualms about using their services. I do try to stay updated on news surrounding Brave though, as they have had quite the large amount of controversies in the past.
> 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.
Nice for them. But I find general-purpose search engines are becoming worse across the board. They're all so bad now that I find them to be a waste of the time more often than not. I've found myself relying more on the search functionality built into websites. Instead of going to google/ddg/brave with the intent of landing on a wikipedia page, I go to wikipedia directly and search there. Wikipedia's search is much better than I remember it being, and I don't have to scroll through half a page of commercial results before finding the page I'm looking for (if what you're searching for is something that could be sold to you, that's what these general purpose search engines will prioritize. They all have a very strong commercial bias.)
Brave's index is too similar to Google's nothing better or worse just roughly the same. I might start using Bing because it seems like the lesser evil of all. At this point Google is too much of a mess.
Brave Search Goggles: Alter search rankings with rules and filters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837986 - June 2022 (45 comments)