solso

5 ms·

1.
by solso 4y ago
Hi Vladimir! Good to see we are in sync. Glad to see Kagi doing well as well. For the record, when I said "long before Kagi was even announced to the public." I meant exactly what I wrote, not that Kagi did not exist, it did.
2.
by solso 4y ago
Disclaimer: Works at Brave, before at Tailcat. Goggles white-paper was released more than a year ago, long before Kagi was even announced to the public. Additionally, before Brave acquired Tailcat (Jan 2021) I had the pleasure to share the
3.
by solso 4y ago
An active choice is better than a passive one, if only because it requires an effort, in that respect the explicitness is an advantage over the typical personalization. The article also mentions that Goggles will not stop polarization, it s
4.
by solso 4y ago
Mojeek is one of the very few players that are building their own index, my respects.
5.
by solso 4y ago
There is plenty of comments discussing on the provenance of DDG results, including from Gabriel himself, which is the one we both have participated in, "it is misleading to say our results just come from Bing." Discussing how many
6.
by solso 4y ago
This is Josep M. Pujol from Brave Search. I'd like to correct some factually incorrect information regarding Brave Search. Brave search crawls the web through the Web Discovery Project and has its own crawler, which fetches a bit more
7.
by solso 5y ago
You bring a very good point on the diversity of information sources, which is something we plan to attack in the near future with open ranking [0] In my opinion having similar results to Google will facilitate adoption. After all, Google is
8.
by solso 5y ago
Mixing with Google results only can happen after opt-in and only in Brave browser. You can see if a single query has been mixed clicking on the `Info`, or check the independence metrics on the `Settings` tab. The fact that you see results s
9.
by solso 6y ago
It is trivial to de-anonymize if records are linkable, which is the case you mention on Dark Data DEFCON25. Another famous case was the de-anonymization of the Netflix data set. However, you are assuming that HumanWeb data collection is rec
10.
by solso 6y ago
The chosen excerpt omits the fact that it is predicated on the HumanWeb. In the technical papers above there is a more precise description on what and how was collected. There was no user tracking, session or history being sent as all data
11.
by solso 6y ago
Mozilla never did such a thing. The browsing history was never sent in any shape or form. As the journalistic article you quote states, Mozilla put in place the HumanWeb[1,2,3], which was a privacy preserving data collection which ensured r
12.
by solso 6y ago
There was no tracking on Cliqz, nor it will be any in Brave. To know more about the underlying tech of Cliqz there are interesting posts at https://0x65.dev , some of them covering how signals are collected, data, but no tracking
13.
by solso 6y ago
You are missing the entire point, "search" is sadly about advertising, not about the search itself :-) Bing is interested serving DDG, Qwant, Ecosia and a lot of other unknown search engines because of the aggregated reach they pr
14.
by solso 6y ago
>> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy > This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected. That's not definit
15.
by solso 6y ago
There were no problems in 2017 or before, we were doing the same exactly the same during Firefox times (we went through security and privacy audits). Data collection is and always was safe wrt to privacy. Why the ruckus then? Because some a
16.
by solso 6y ago
This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Thanks for noticing it, we will create an issue. UUIDs only applies to telemetry, which
17.
by solso 6y ago
Brave is based on Chrome, whereas Cliqz is based on Firefox (just to be precise). Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right (what happens with
18.
by solso 6y ago
Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them. Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to country (depending
19.
by solso 6y ago
Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly a
20.
by solso 6y ago
Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collec
21.
by solso 7y ago
No, I would not call it a shame, and I think that no-one should either. In fact, what DDG does is admirable IMHO. First, they do not hide that they aggregate. It's fanboys that tend to overextend DDG's capabilities, not them (at l
22.
by solso 7y ago
You can check for yourself, Bing seems to the the user agent... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22my+user+agent%22&t=h_&ia=web
23.
by solso 7y ago
I think that if Google was prevented (somehow) to pay for user acquisition that would actually be enough to allow competition in. They use billions each year to acquire users, even though they are a dominant market share. Why would they do
24.
by solso 7y ago
That's not a problem per se, it's just unlikely to happen because of the insane amount of the bill, and the roi is not that good anyway. For instance, Google pays Apple 9 billion/year to be the default search engine (incredib
25.
by solso 7y ago
When the monopoly is strong as Google is, with market shares around 90%, and they use 20-30% of their revenue for 'user acquisition' (they pay to be default in any platforms: from Apple, to Samsung, to Telcos, etc.) Basically they
26.
by solso 7y ago
[Disclaimer: I do work at Cliqz] There is plenty of documentation on data collected (see first posts regarding Human Web on the tech blog), how anonymization works, why record-linkability on data collected is prevented (and forbidden), etc.
27.
by solso 7y ago
[Disclaimer I work for Cliqz] This is 100% personal opinion, not a spokesman neither for Cliqz nor Burda. As all German media? Yes, it seems that they were lobbying for it, not clear if they still are part of the consortium or not. Why? No
28.
by solso 7y ago
[Disclaimer I work for Cliqz] Copying, learning would be a bit more precise, and I'm not kidding. We do not answer queries 1 to 1, query-logs are used to build a more concise model of the page. It's not just a cache, we started li
29.
by solso 7y ago
[Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz] Hi, I read the thread and thought the answer was good enough, but it seems that you are not yet convinced. Let me try: 1) Here there is a list of publications regarding privacy by Cliqz (including published sci
30.
by solso 7y ago
[Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz] Sorry for taking so long to reply, I was personally trying to dig some information about this. An additional disclaimer: not a lawyer either. Honestly, I have little idea of how this law affects search engines.

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