10 ms·

Brave Search launches own image and video search

245 points by gripfx 3y ago

NayamAmarshe 3y ago
That's awesome! I've been using Brave Search for years and it's my favorite search engine ever!
cheald 3y ago
I'm very glad for this! I've been using Brave search almost since it launched, and the standard results have gotten great, but it's always been a bummer to have to go out to Bing/Google for images/video. It's really nice having an alternative that isn't just wrapper around someone else's search index.
- ignitionmonkey 3y ago
  Same here. Much like Firefox, I think it's important to use a search index that isn't tied to the larger players (Bing and Google in this case). I tried Brave a couple of months ago[1], I found the results better than Bing, but without image search it wasn't usable. Now I can give it another go. [1]: https://jahed.dev/2023/07/01/trying-brave-search/ https://jahed.dev/2023/07/01/trying-brave-search/
  - waithuh 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, if you dont want to be 'tied to the larger players', why not use metasearch engines like SearX? If Google does not have a great answer, Bing does, or Mojeek.
    - ignitionmonkey 3y ago
      I'm referring to a default search engine. Something I can use by default everywhere and I can recommend to others. So it has to provide results based on typical use cases. First I've heard of a "metasearch" engine. I just tried SearX and it gave me no results for my projects and only a couple for "Mastodon", but the animal not the software.
- em-bee 3y ago
  i have been using brave search for a while now and i was surprised and am very satisfied with the search results. missing image and video search was a bit annoying mostly in that it linked to google and bing but not any other search engines. but i just remembered to switch to where i wanted to do image search instead. it sometimes meant that i had to go back to retype my search query, but i'd rather have a good text search than be bothered by that. in most cases i'd know ahead of time if i wanted images so it was easy to pick the right search engine.
  - SparkyMcUnicorn 3y ago
    I'm a little surprised to hear other people having such good results. Brave search was my default for quite a while, until a few weeks after they got rid of bing results. As soon as that happened, stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be there, and 90% of the time I'd follow up searches with !g or !ddg just to get something decent to show up. The index just felt severely lacking, or the relevancy was pretty far off base. Would you say search has greatly improved over the past month or two?
    - computronus 3y ago
      Possibly, at least for my own experience. It's much less often that I rerun a search with !g. Brave Search's results are becoming more relevant to my own queries, and Google's becoming less so. Not to mention how ads like to masquerade as ordinary Google results; using Google is starting to feel less comfortable.
      - mrweasel 3y ago
        That seems to be the general case, other search engines. Especially Bing and those based on Bing are yield increasingly good results, while Google is just ads and spam.
    - cheald 3y ago
      I feel like it's improved steadily over time. I used to find it severely lacking for anything code-related, but that's improved, too. It's not as good as Google was at its peak (and Google itself has degraded severely in quality, IMO), but it's good enough that I can generally find what I'm looking for with a minimum of effort. I run maybe 1 in 40-50 searches with "!g" because Brave is insufficient, for context.
andrewclunn 3y ago
[flagged]
- colordrops 3y ago
  What does being "woke" or "based" mean when it comes to concrete issues you have using their products?
  - veave 3y ago
    In this context... well, bing hiding the tiananmen square protests (mentioned in the article) or google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" are two incidents that come to mind.
    - smallerfish 3y ago
      Bing hiding "tank man" is not "woke" by any common definition of the term. Got a reference on the Google incident? Sounds like misinformation.
      - veave 3y ago
        There are a few references online if you search for '"american inventors" "google"' or something. For obvious reasons it was never covered in any tech blog. https://twitter.com/Micki_Harbour/status/894871335104630784 https://twitter.com/Micki_Harbour/status/894871335104630784 https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/88a5hv/is_something_wrong_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/88a5hv/is_somethi...
        manuelabeledo 3y ago
        This is irrelevant. How many references to e.g. Edison will you find online, remarking that he was "white"? In a context of ethnic debate in the US, mentioning "white" anything, will most likely revolve around "black" anything.
    - 3y ago
lern_too_spel 3y ago
When will Brave Search launch a crawler update that lets me specifically block its crawler in robots.txt like every other search engine supports?
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  I see they say "if a domain or page is not crawlable by any search engine (it has a noindex tag), or if it is not crawlable by googlebot, then Brave Search’s bot will not crawl it either." 1: https://brave.com/search/api/ https://brave.com/search/api/
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    What if I want googlebot to crawl it but not bravebot? Every other search engine lets me block its crawler specifically. Only Brave has this shady policy.
    - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
      Hmm, I agree it's odd, but 'shady' seems to attribute malice to what could just be stupidity?
      - lern_too_spel 3y ago
        Brave has a track record of malice driven by stupidity.
      - d_theorist 3y ago
        Or probably just an innocent oversight? I imagine they might have taken this decision early on when they were far too small for anybody to even think of not wanting to be crawled by them, and just never revisited the decision.
        skilled 3y ago
        It’s not so innocent, https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/ https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai...
msp26 3y ago
No mention of reverse image search sadly. I've been looking for anything better than Google/yandex forever.
- veave 3y ago
  Bing has its own and it's not bad. Usually google+tineye+bing+yandex will yield some useful results
  - CoBE10 3y ago
    In the last few months Bing has been much more reliable for me at reverse finding original sources of cover album images that have been posted on Discogs. Google seems to not give me images that have been posted a long time ago (10+ years maybe), but Bing still does.
  - kilroy123 3y ago
    If you're looking for people I was add pimeyes to that list.
- davidm1729 3y ago
  Hi, I'm David and I've worked along other engineers at Brave on this! Thanks for your feedback, it would certainly be a nice addition, although we may want to focus a bit more on quality first. Thanks!
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Thank you for you and your team's hard work on this. To break the small monopoly on image search is no easy thing and I appreciate it. It also explains why Brave Search is slow today I suspect... :)
  - teruakohatu 3y ago
    Hi David, reverse image search is an easier problem than good search quality. I am happy to chat with you about it, email in HN profile.
- 3y ago
CoBE10 3y ago
Also reported here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/brave_cuts_ties_with_bing/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/brave_cuts_ties_with_...
user3939382 3y ago
My priority for search is that it’s free of political censorship and weighting. Google is abysmal on this issue, then we had the DDG CEO on here making excuses for his very clear statements about Russian news sources. I don’t need or want anyone else to decide for me what qualifies as “misinformation” I will decide that for myself. It surprisingly comes up for image searching. Google for example has been known to censor images of Tiananmen Square.
- wusher 3y ago
  this is exactly why i switched from ddg to brave
  - gettodachoppa 3y ago
    I didn't even know about Brave Search! Thanks for the heads up, I'll switch now and see how it compares. DDG's CEO praising censorship of Russian sites definitely soured me on them.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  On the topic of "weighting", Brave Goggles allow you to decide the weighting/ranking yourself, and is a great and under-used feature. The UI is a bit lacking (you have to create a goggle as a github gist/repo, publish it by submitting it to them, then bookmark an unweildy URL that's the link to your custom search engine), but the goggle syntax is pretty expressive and easy to use.
rejectfinite 3y ago
Very nice! I just switched to Brave Search from DDG on Brave and I kind of like it. Now... I would just like to see the full https url on searches. I already love the look, Brave summarizer AI and general results!
butz 3y ago
Good, but we need more alternative search engines, even very niche ones.
mg 3y ago
As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search engines on the web: Baidu Bing Brave Google Yandex You can compare their results on this search comparison page I maintain: https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1 https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1 (If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and Pexels, click on "more engines" to select all places you want to search)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SomeoneOnTheWeb 3y ago
  Shouldn't Kagi (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com) also be on that list?
  - MildRant 3y ago
    Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but Kagi uses Google search results. I'm sure it's more complicated than that and they have their own secret sauce but it is not an independent search engine. See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html
    - anderber 3y ago
      I believe you're correct. Kagi just uses Google's API and makes some changes on top of it.
    - Terretta 3y ago
      > Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but Kagi uses Google search results. Click two links down in the same menu: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content. Our unique results combined from all of these sources help you discover the best content you can possibly find online, sometimes from the quieter places on the web.
JEDI-HACKER 3y ago
[dead]
qwertox 3y ago
I'm always staying away from Brave because I've been confronted so many times with bait-and-switch tactics that I have the feeling that one day they will move away from being good and monetize all the collected data, even though they don't collect data. I'm so skeptical that I'm just now starting to develop a feeling of trust towards DuckDuckGo. In the browser domain, Mozilla is the only company of which I feel that it is genuinely pro-customer. So I give all my stuff to Google and hope that they at least just protect it from hackers, while I am aware that they analyze my data in order to see how they can monetize me better, but at least with anonymity in regards to 3rd parties. I just hope I'm not wrong.
- metadat 3y ago
  You should check these assumptions, Mozilla has been hard at work enshittifying their entire portfolio. Instead of giving the public features they actually want (the most secure, performant, and predictable web browser), the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features. My god, there is so much telemetry in FF now, and it's tricky to hunt down all the about:configs to disable it. Not friendly or privacy conscious at all. Do you really want Mozilla to get pinged with your IP address every time your browser process starts and exits? Yuck! Quick FF enshittification example from 2 months ago: Alert HN: Mozilla puts advertising into Firefox AGAIN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322 (48 comments) Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642 (220 comments)
  - hipsterstal1n 3y ago
    > the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features. They literally can't win. One group of vocal users is outraged by how much money Mozilla takes from Google while the other half screams about how Mozilla is trying to gasp gain additional revenue streams that isn't taking money from their biggest competitor. > Do you really want Mozilla to get pinged with your IP address every time your browser process starts and exits? Yuck! No, but I really don't give a shit either. At a certain point, I looked in the mirror and said life is too short to care about stupid shit like that. If I was a spy or a journalist in some state like China or Iran, maybe I would care. But this feels odd to hone in on when any website you go to is collecting all sorts of info of this sort.
nxrabl 3y ago
That makes two companies who both maintain their own Chromium forks and run direct competitors to core Google search products. I wonder if we'll see Google start to close off open development on Chrome - Microsoft will likely be fine, but that could put Brave in a precarious position.
- vanviegen 3y ago
  I'm not sure if they can without rewriting the whole thing, the original (WebKit/KHTML) code base being GPL. On the other hand, the Google lawyers seem to have found an excuse to link some proprietary code into Chome (that's not part of Chromium). Does anybody know what that excuse is, and if it provides a loophole large enough to close off Chrome development?
  - soundnote 3y ago
    They could pull a Red Hat.
eviks 3y ago
Very nice! (though I've recently switched away from Brave Search since the goggles subscriptions (the reason I've switched to Brave) have a big bar right at the top and the whole top settings+goggles shifts search results on load!)
post-factum 3y ago
I'd appreciate if it'd possible to select Czech Republic and Ukraine as regions for search.
pierrefar 3y ago
The major problem with Brave search is their position about indexing and licensing content against the wishes of the website publisher. Their robot does not identify itself, meaning the publisher cannot use the standard robots.txt to block its crawling if the publisher so wishes. Incidentally, the robots.txt file has been used in court cases litigating if a search engine is legal or not. Even worse, they state that Brave search won't index a page only if other search engines are not allowed to index it. It is morally not their right to make that call. A publisher should have full control to discriminate which search engine indexes the website's content. That's the very heart of why the Robots Exclusion Protocol exists, and Brave is brazenly ignoring it. Even worse than that, the Brave search API allows you (for an extra fee) to get the content with a "license" to use the content for AI training? Who allowed them the right to distribute the content that way? I wrote about all this here: https://searchengineland.com/crawlers-search-engines-generative-ai-companies-429389 https://searchengineland.com/crawlers-search-engines-generat... and more references elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989129 Amusingly, while I was writing my article, this got posted to their forums, asking about how to block their crawler: https://community.brave.com/t/stop-website-being-shown-in-brave-search/495774 https://community.brave.com/t/stop-website-being-shown-in-br... No reply so far.
- yreg 3y ago
  Hmm, I don't know, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it is unethical to disobey the publisher wishes. If you post something to the open web, what's it to you who reads it and how? You can block some IPs but that's about it. I don't know if Brave has a knowledge graph - if they do, I would understand objecting if they filled it in with “stolen” content. But I don't see what's the problem with search. By the way, isn't everyone's favourite archive.is doing the same thing? I have no strong opinion on this, curious to hear counter arguments.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    I’m just thinking that if website publishers are able to legally allow Googlebot but block other bots, it might contribute to the Google monopoly.
whalesalad 3y ago
I wish brave (and everyone else on the internet) would abandon the poppins font it's nauseating.
soundnote 3y ago
Excellent news. Now to see how well it holds up.
gettodachoppa 3y ago
I like Brave and trust Brendan Eich, but what happens when they cash out and the next owners decide to monetize all this data? The current policies don't allow it, sure. But then there will be gradual changes to those policies, and all sorts of dark patterns that make 99% of users leak their data (think "enabled by default but opt-out"). Is there any guarantee against this?
- BrendanEich 3y ago
  We don't collect any data, so there's nothing to "monetize". We bring ad matching and blind confirmations to the browser, no need for collection. You have to realize data is worth less over time -- a lot less. So the issue would be whether users stick if (heaven forbid) a change of control left Brave in the hands of unethical owners. By design, open source, network sniffing, and other auditors would catch wise and flame such a corrupt Brave into the ground. That's the best we can do here. There is no safety property ("X" holds for all future program states) enforceable on a company.

245 points by gripfx 3y ago

That's awesome! I've been using Brave Search for years and it's my favorite search engine ever!

I'm very glad for this! I've been using Brave search almost since it launched, and the standard results have gotten great, but it's always been a bummer to have to go out to Bing/Google for images/video. It's really nice having an alternative that isn't just wrapper around someone else's search index.

ignitionmonkey 3y ago
Same here. Much like Firefox, I think it's important to use a search index that isn't tied to the larger players (Bing and Google in this case). I tried Brave a couple of months ago[1], I found the results better than Bing, but without image search it wasn't usable. Now I can give it another go. [1]: https://jahed.dev/2023/07/01/trying-brave-search/ https://jahed.dev/2023/07/01/trying-brave-search/
- waithuh 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, if you dont want to be 'tied to the larger players', why not use metasearch engines like SearX? If Google does not have a great answer, Bing does, or Mojeek.
  - ignitionmonkey 3y ago
    I'm referring to a default search engine. Something I can use by default everywhere and I can recommend to others. So it has to provide results based on typical use cases. First I've heard of a "metasearch" engine. I just tried SearX and it gave me no results for my projects and only a couple for "Mastodon", but the animal not the software.
em-bee 3y ago
i have been using brave search for a while now and i was surprised and am very satisfied with the search results. missing image and video search was a bit annoying mostly in that it linked to google and bing but not any other search engines. but i just remembered to switch to where i wanted to do image search instead. it sometimes meant that i had to go back to retype my search query, but i'd rather have a good text search than be bothered by that. in most cases i'd know ahead of time if i wanted images so it was easy to pick the right search engine.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 3y ago
  I'm a little surprised to hear other people having such good results. Brave search was my default for quite a while, until a few weeks after they got rid of bing results. As soon as that happened, stuff just wasn't showing up that I'd expect to be there, and 90% of the time I'd follow up searches with !g or !ddg just to get something decent to show up. The index just felt severely lacking, or the relevancy was pretty far off base. Would you say search has greatly improved over the past month or two?
  - computronus 3y ago
    Possibly, at least for my own experience. It's much less often that I rerun a search with !g. Brave Search's results are becoming more relevant to my own queries, and Google's becoming less so. Not to mention how ads like to masquerade as ordinary Google results; using Google is starting to feel less comfortable.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      That seems to be the general case, other search engines. Especially Bing and those based on Bing are yield increasingly good results, while Google is just ads and spam.
  - cheald 3y ago
    I feel like it's improved steadily over time. I used to find it severely lacking for anything code-related, but that's improved, too. It's not as good as Google was at its peak (and Google itself has degraded severely in quality, IMO), but it's good enough that I can generally find what I'm looking for with a minimum of effort. I run maybe 1 in 40-50 searches with "!g" because Brave is insufficient, for context.

andrewclunn 3y ago

[flagged]

colordrops 3y ago
What does being "woke" or "based" mean when it comes to concrete issues you have using their products?
- veave 3y ago
  In this context... well, bing hiding the tiananmen square protests (mentioned in the article) or google returning a list of exclusively black people when you searched for "american inventors" are two incidents that come to mind.
  - smallerfish 3y ago
    Bing hiding "tank man" is not "woke" by any common definition of the term. Got a reference on the Google incident? Sounds like misinformation.
    - veave 3y ago
      There are a few references online if you search for '"american inventors" "google"' or something. For obvious reasons it was never covered in any tech blog. https://twitter.com/Micki_Harbour/status/894871335104630784 https://twitter.com/Micki_Harbour/status/894871335104630784 https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/88a5hv/is_something_wrong_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/88a5hv/is_somethi...
      - manuelabeledo 3y ago
        This is irrelevant. How many references to e.g. Edison will you find online, remarking that he was "white"? In a context of ethnic debate in the US, mentioning "white" anything, will most likely revolve around "black" anything.
  - 3y ago

lern_too_spel 3y ago

When will Brave Search launch a crawler update that lets me specifically block its crawler in robots.txt like every other search engine supports?

blacksmith_tb 3y ago
I see they say "if a domain or page is not crawlable by any search engine (it has a noindex tag), or if it is not crawlable by googlebot, then Brave Search’s bot will not crawl it either." 1: https://brave.com/search/api/ https://brave.com/search/api/
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  What if I want googlebot to crawl it but not bravebot? Every other search engine lets me block its crawler specifically. Only Brave has this shady policy.
  - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    Hmm, I agree it's odd, but 'shady' seems to attribute malice to what could just be stupidity?
    - lern_too_spel 3y ago
      Brave has a track record of malice driven by stupidity.
    - d_theorist 3y ago
      Or probably just an innocent oversight? I imagine they might have taken this decision early on when they were far too small for anybody to even think of not wanting to be crawled by them, and just never revisited the decision.
      - skilled 3y ago
        It’s not so innocent, https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/ https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai...

msp26 3y ago

No mention of reverse image search sadly. I've been looking for anything better than Google/yandex forever.

veave 3y ago
Bing has its own and it's not bad. Usually google+tineye+bing+yandex will yield some useful results
- CoBE10 3y ago
  In the last few months Bing has been much more reliable for me at reverse finding original sources of cover album images that have been posted on Discogs. Google seems to not give me images that have been posted a long time ago (10+ years maybe), but Bing still does.
- kilroy123 3y ago
  If you're looking for people I was add pimeyes to that list.
davidm1729 3y ago
Hi, I'm David and I've worked along other engineers at Brave on this! Thanks for your feedback, it would certainly be a nice addition, although we may want to focus a bit more on quality first. Thanks!
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Thank you for you and your team's hard work on this. To break the small monopoly on image search is no easy thing and I appreciate it. It also explains why Brave Search is slow today I suspect... :)
- teruakohatu 3y ago
  Hi David, reverse image search is an easier problem than good search quality. I am happy to chat with you about it, email in HN profile.
3y ago

CoBE10 3y ago

Also reported here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/brave_cuts_ties_with_bing/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/brave_cuts_ties_with_...

user3939382 3y ago

My priority for search is that it’s free of political censorship and weighting. Google is abysmal on this issue, then we had the DDG CEO on here making excuses for his very clear statements about Russian news sources. I don’t need or want anyone else to decide for me what qualifies as “misinformation” I will decide that for myself. It surprisingly comes up for image searching. Google for example has been known to censor images of Tiananmen Square.

wusher 3y ago
this is exactly why i switched from ddg to brave
- gettodachoppa 3y ago
  I didn't even know about Brave Search! Thanks for the heads up, I'll switch now and see how it compares. DDG's CEO praising censorship of Russian sites definitely soured me on them.
sundarurfriend 3y ago
On the topic of "weighting", Brave Goggles allow you to decide the weighting/ranking yourself, and is a great and under-used feature. The UI is a bit lacking (you have to create a goggle as a github gist/repo, publish it by submitting it to them, then bookmark an unweildy URL that's the link to your custom search engine), but the goggle syntax is pretty expressive and easy to use.

rejectfinite 3y ago

Very nice! I just switched to Brave Search from DDG on Brave and I kind of like it. Now... I would just like to see the full https url on searches. I already love the look, Brave summarizer AI and general results!

butz 3y ago

Good, but we need more alternative search engines, even very niche ones.

mg 3y ago

As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search engines on the web: Baidu Bing Brave Google Yandex You can compare their results on this search comparison page I maintain: https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1 https://www.gnod.com/search/?engines=p,o,br,n,q&nw=1 (If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and Pexels, click on "more engines" to select all places you want to search)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SomeoneOnTheWeb 3y ago
Shouldn't Kagi (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com) also be on that list?
- MildRant 3y ago
  Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but Kagi uses Google search results. I'm sure it's more complicated than that and they have their own secret sauce but it is not an independent search engine. See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html
  - anderber 3y ago
    I believe you're correct. Kagi just uses Google's API and makes some changes on top of it.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    > Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but Kagi uses Google search results. Click two links down in the same menu: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content. Our unique results combined from all of these sources help you discover the best content you can possibly find online, sometimes from the quieter places on the web.

JEDI-HACKER 3y ago

[dead]

qwertox 3y ago

I'm always staying away from Brave because I've been confronted so many times with bait-and-switch tactics that I have the feeling that one day they will move away from being good and monetize all the collected data, even though they don't collect data. I'm so skeptical that I'm just now starting to develop a feeling of trust towards DuckDuckGo. In the browser domain, Mozilla is the only company of which I feel that it is genuinely pro-customer. So I give all my stuff to Google and hope that they at least just protect it from hackers, while I am aware that they analyze my data in order to see how they can monetize me better, but at least with anonymity in regards to 3rd parties. I just hope I'm not wrong.

metadat 3y ago
You should check these assumptions, Mozilla has been hard at work enshittifying their entire portfolio. Instead of giving the public features they actually want (the most secure, performant, and predictable web browser), the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features. My god, there is so much telemetry in FF now, and it's tricky to hunt down all the about:configs to disable it. Not friendly or privacy conscious at all. Do you really want Mozilla to get pinged with your IP address every time your browser process starts and exits? Yuck! Quick FF enshittification example from 2 months ago: Alert HN: Mozilla puts advertising into Firefox AGAIN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322 (48 comments) Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642 (220 comments)
- hipsterstal1n 3y ago
  > the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features. They literally can't win. One group of vocal users is outraged by how much money Mozilla takes from Google while the other half screams about how Mozilla is trying to gasp gain additional revenue streams that isn't taking money from their biggest competitor. > Do you really want Mozilla to get pinged with your IP address every time your browser process starts and exits? Yuck! No, but I really don't give a shit either. At a certain point, I looked in the mirror and said life is too short to care about stupid shit like that. If I was a spy or a journalist in some state like China or Iran, maybe I would care. But this feels odd to hone in on when any website you go to is collecting all sorts of info of this sort.

nxrabl 3y ago

That makes two companies who both maintain their own Chromium forks and run direct competitors to core Google search products. I wonder if we'll see Google start to close off open development on Chrome - Microsoft will likely be fine, but that could put Brave in a precarious position.

vanviegen 3y ago
I'm not sure if they can without rewriting the whole thing, the original (WebKit/KHTML) code base being GPL. On the other hand, the Google lawyers seem to have found an excuse to link some proprietary code into Chome (that's not part of Chromium). Does anybody know what that excuse is, and if it provides a loophole large enough to close off Chrome development?
- soundnote 3y ago
  They could pull a Red Hat.

eviks 3y ago

Very nice! (though I've recently switched away from Brave Search since the goggles subscriptions (the reason I've switched to Brave) have a big bar right at the top and the whole top settings+goggles shifts search results on load!)

post-factum 3y ago

I'd appreciate if it'd possible to select Czech Republic and Ukraine as regions for search.

pierrefar 3y ago

The major problem with Brave search is their position about indexing and licensing content against the wishes of the website publisher. Their robot does not identify itself, meaning the publisher cannot use the standard robots.txt to block its crawling if the publisher so wishes. Incidentally, the robots.txt file has been used in court cases litigating if a search engine is legal or not. Even worse, they state that Brave search won't index a page only if other search engines are not allowed to index it. It is morally not their right to make that call. A publisher should have full control to discriminate which search engine indexes the website's content. That's the very heart of why the Robots Exclusion Protocol exists, and Brave is brazenly ignoring it. Even worse than that, the Brave search API allows you (for an extra fee) to get the content with a "license" to use the content for AI training? Who allowed them the right to distribute the content that way? I wrote about all this here: https://searchengineland.com/crawlers-search-engines-generative-ai-companies-429389 https://searchengineland.com/crawlers-search-engines-generat... and more references elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989129 Amusingly, while I was writing my article, this got posted to their forums, asking about how to block their crawler: https://community.brave.com/t/stop-website-being-shown-in-brave-search/495774 https://community.brave.com/t/stop-website-being-shown-in-br... No reply so far.

yreg 3y ago
Hmm, I don't know, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it is unethical to disobey the publisher wishes. If you post something to the open web, what's it to you who reads it and how? You can block some IPs but that's about it. I don't know if Brave has a knowledge graph - if they do, I would understand objecting if they filled it in with “stolen” content. But I don't see what's the problem with search. By the way, isn't everyone's favourite archive.is doing the same thing? I have no strong opinion on this, curious to hear counter arguments.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  I’m just thinking that if website publishers are able to legally allow Googlebot but block other bots, it might contribute to the Google monopoly.

whalesalad 3y ago

I wish brave (and everyone else on the internet) would abandon the poppins font it's nauseating.

soundnote 3y ago

Excellent news. Now to see how well it holds up.

gettodachoppa 3y ago

I like Brave and trust Brendan Eich, but what happens when they cash out and the next owners decide to monetize all this data? The current policies don't allow it, sure. But then there will be gradual changes to those policies, and all sorts of dark patterns that make 99% of users leak their data (think "enabled by default but opt-out"). Is there any guarantee against this?

BrendanEich 3y ago
We don't collect any data, so there's nothing to "monetize". We bring ad matching and blind confirmations to the browser, no need for collection. You have to realize data is worth less over time -- a lot less. So the issue would be whether users stick if (heaven forbid) a change of control left Brave in the hands of unethical owners. By design, open source, network sniffing, and other auditors would catch wise and flame such a corrupt Brave into the ground. That's the best we can do here. There is no safety property ("X" holds for all future program states) enforceable on a company.