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The Internet

Privacy-first Browser Brave Now Has Its Own Google Search Rival (wired.co.uk) 50

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Two years after publicly launching a privacy-focussed browser, Brave, founded by former Mozilla executive Brendan Eich, is taking on Google's search business, too. From a report: The announcement of Brave Search puts the upstart in the rare position of taking on both Google's browser and search dominance. Eich says that Brave Search, which has opened a waitlist and will launch in the first half of this year, won't track or profile people who use it. "Brave already has a default anonymous user model with no data collection at all," he says adding this will continue in its search engine. No IP addresses will be collected and the company is exploring how it can create both a paid, ad-free search engine and one that comes with ads.

But building a search engine isn't straightforward. [...] Eich says Brave isn't starting its search engine or index from scratch and won't be using indexes from Bing or other tech firms. Instead Brave has purchased Tailcat, an offshoot of German search engine Cliqz, which was owned by Hubert Burda Media and closed down last year. The purchase includes an index of the web that's been created by Tailcat and the technology that powers it. Eich says that some users will be given the ability to opt-in to anonymous data collection to help fine-tune search results. "What Tailcat does is it looks at a query log and a click log anonymously," Eich says. "These allow it to build an index, which Tailcat has done and already did at Cliqz, and it's getting bigger." He admits that the index will not be anywhere near as deep as Google's but that the top results it surfaces are largely the same.
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Privacy-first Browser Brave Now Has Its Own Google Search Rival More

Privacy-first Browser Brave Now Has Its Own Google Search Rival

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  • I like it but it's got quirks that keep me using Firefox and Chrome. So while they can certainly challenge Google, (not like Duck Duck isn't already) is their search engine any good?

    • > is their search engine any good?

      >> Brave Search, which has opened a waitlist and will launch in the first half of this year,

      and, yeah, millions of people use Brave. Half ad-adverse, half pro-privacy, and the rest are BAT proponents.

    • What are those quirks you mentioned?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        The biggest "quirk" I see is that they apparently missed a lot of the checking in with google that they tried to remove from chrome.

        Try leaving Brave running with no windows while running Little Snitch or similar.

        There are a handful of both IPv4 and IPv6 queries coming from brave as it starts, with a couple an hour after that. When you look further into it, they seem to be going to google domains.

        Blocking them doesn't seem to prevent performance.

        I use Brave for Duolingo on my Macs, and when I need to read

      • What are those quirks you mentioned?

        Here [wsj.com], read up...

    • I use Brave on mobile because Mozilla refuses to add Pull Down to Refresh to anything but the Firefox nightly beta builds, which can be woefully unstable. Brave works pretty well in mobile. No need on the desktop, as Firefox just does everything. As far as search, who knows? DDG still uses Bing to supplement their own results, so it's not like it's easy to catch up to Google. The question for most probably will be how it compares to DDG, not to Google, because that's where the first wave of potential c

      • Pull down to reload is another one of those annoying anti-features that overload the already stupidly invisible UI, so that you fall over it all the time... which is "good", because otherwise you'd never find it.

        Aka Apple "simplicity" (read "cumbersomeness").

        I prefer a sane UI. Finger-sized physical buttons that tell you when something got triggered, and context switches that never ever change anything below your finger.

        • I don't find it problematic. It takes effort to trigger in Safari and in Chromium based browsers. Yes, it's invisible and developers can do a better job of showcasing gestures, but gestures dramatically improve the mobile experience when done right and that is one of them, particularly on large screens where the refresh button may be somewhere out of reach of your thumb

    • I ended up not going with Brave, but another Chrome variant called Vivaldi [vivaldi.com].. it just seemed a bit nicer to me, and theoretically it's more advanced tab handling may be useful.

    • I use it on my iPhone. It's faster than Chrome and blocks some ads.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      I like it but it's got quirks that keep me using Firefox and Chrome. So while they can certainly challenge Google, (not like Duck Duck isn't already) is their search engine any good?

      I'm curious what quirks you still find in it? Brave has been my daily driver for a while now, while I use Chrome for official work duties, Brave is for everything else. It has the compatibility with Chrome rendering, while being OS neutral and cleanly disconnecting from Google's middleware. And on top of that, some of the anti-canvas privacy protection they've done has helped push protection forward across the board.

      The last big sticking point for me was the lack of sync between mobile and desktop, and that

  • A browser and a search engine from the guy who invented the shitshow known as "JavaScript"? Count me out.
    • I don't really like JavaScript as a language but it wouldn't matter if it were a better language because it's what people try and use it for that creates such a goddamn mess. The other problem is that it's being used by a lot of people who probably have little or no formal programming training, which isn't strictly necessary to learn how to write good code, but a lot of people writing JavaScript probably have no real desire to learn how to code. Any situation like that would turn into a shitshow.

    • Yes, because people never learn or move on, and we should hate people for mistakes they made decades ago.

      You'd make an excellent SJW.

      Also, JS got severely misused. Like HTML or Java, it is something simple, for kids and grandmas and other "average people" to quickly add a small and non-critical thing not possible with HTML/CSS in the 90s.
      It's like the a hospital using zsh to run their life support machines, and hating Stephen Bourne because people are dying.

    • Aw come on, give him some slack! Every developer can have a bad day and crank out a bad idea. Or week, as in the case of creating JS.

  • What makes Brave privacy-first? Empty list. (Score:4, Informative)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @01:27PM (#61119970)
    Brave could only be considered privacy first in a nearly empty list. You actually need to NOT collect personal data and not auto-compile if you are serious about privacy. They do try to stop unaffiliated tracking, so they are better out of the box than other browsers operating without addons.

  • One major problem with brave IMO (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    brave uses the same rendering engine as chrome which to me is a problem, i want googles choke hold on the web loosened and just by using a webkit based browser you're strengthening it as they get to dictate the standard that defines how the web works.

    • Which is also the whole point of the scheme to kill all other browser makers with changes too quick to adapt to... to drive your point home.

      It's like that Virtudyne saga on TheDailyWTF, where they tried to write an MS Office killer *IN* MS Office's VBA!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      brave uses the same rendering engine as chrome which to me is a problem, i want googles choke hold on the web loosened and just by using a webkit based browser you're strengthening it as they get to dictate the standard that defines how the web works.

      That's 2007 thinking. Although I'd like Brave to be able to use WebKit (or better yet, switch back and forth), it uses Chromium. The important parts are to loosen the Google middleware and data collection, and Brave has done an admirable job trying to catch all of those. Rendering standards are much less important now compared to larger issues such as ad-tech and social media Share control.

      If you really want rendering debates to mean something, you need to deal with the whole IETF/WHATWG fiasco. And you sho

  • As in adding a TOR component that then proceeded to leak TOR URLs to the DNS of your ISP just a few days back?

    I think I very much mistrust this product and anything connected with it...

  • The company is exploring how it can create both a paid, ad-free search engine and one that comes with ads.

    The paid, ad-free model might be viable, but not the one that come with ads in this instance. Advertisers aren't going to pay for ads that are not targeted. Targeting ads requires collecting (and sharing) data about users. An advertising platform that "won't profile people that use it" is destined to fail.

    • Brave already has advertising [brave.com] in the browser that has shown some success [brave.com]. I presume their search engine ads will continue in that vein.

      • Brave already has advertising [brave.com] in the browser that has shown some success [brave.com].

        That's interesting. Perhaps my assumption is incorrect. The challenge with advertising is that most businesses can only afford to reach a limited number of viewers, so they need to target very specifically to get the most bang for their buck. The alternative would be scattershot advertising that reaches a large number of viewers but is very cheap. (E-mail spam falls into this category). Perhaps what Brave offers to advertisers is cheap enough that they can afford to reach a large number of (untargeted) view

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

      It's chicken and egg.

      If, for example, Google presented ads based on search terms - with no personal info as input other than the current search and an aggregated database of frequent searches (and clicked results), they'd still own the lion's share of search advertising - based on owning the lion's share of search. Advertisers would still have to advertise there if they wanted their ads tied to specific search queries. Google uses your info in search to make search work better. So Google would still have

      • ... As long as they worked well enough to get a huge number of users, advertisers would ... follow the users.

        Agreed. I just posted another reply along these lines - that if advertising isn't targeted, it needs to be very cheap and very widely distributed.

    • Advertisers aren't going to pay for ads that are not targeted.

      They're sort of targeted, though, in that they're targeted at a person who'd go out of their way to use something like Brave. I'd presume that Brave's own user-base is a reasonably predictable niche demographic, and it's probably at least as enticing for some advertisers as (for example) placing an ad in a magazine that covers some kind of specialist topic.

      And maybe that's representative, in a way, of the bigger problem. I go out of my way to t

      • Being followed around and having data about me collated concerns and annoys me, but nowhere near as much as the concern of now having to live in a world where, increasingly, nearly everyone is having data collated about them on a massive scale...

        I absolutely agree. Having been involved in IT since the late 1980's, I've been saddened to see how the Internet has devolved from a free-spirited collaborative platform to a massive surveillance network.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      The company is exploring how it can create both a paid, ad-free search engine and one that comes with ads.

      The paid, ad-free model might be viable, but not the one that come with ads in this instance. Advertisers aren't going to pay for ads that are not targeted.

      Sure they will -- they just won't pay very much for it. And thus, whatever you're trying to support with that ad revenue won't be getting nearly as much in the way of revenue. That's why there hasn't been a general purpose YouTube killer yet... just a bunch of niche providers covering video segments Google explicitly doesn't want.

      Even if you disagree with the particular niches others create, it's important for the health of the internet that non-targeted ads not using consumer profiling remain a viable opti

  • Try this : https://www.meta-press.es/ [meta-press.es]
    Try it, really. I'm bluffed. At least, with the French / European press here it works spectacularly...
    Maybe someone here will explain more than I could...

    • Hi, I'm the main dev of Meta-Press.es. Meta-Press.es is a meta-search engine, it queries the search feature of each targeted newspaper and aggregates the results in chronological order. In the particular case of the press, where the date is the main relevency criteria between "news", it works well and 100 sources can be fetched in a few seconds. Newspapers are scrapped from the web (or RSS feeds of results), one by one. So you save, at each query, the time that the developpers spent parsing the newspapers

  • Just use Tor browser (with ublock addon) and Startpage search engine (addon available).

    https://www.torproject.org/ [torproject.org]

    • I created an account to answer the previous comment, and I can't resist suggesting that Meta-Press.es works also very well once installed on the TorBrowser. (The next release will fix the current display quirks). As stated in the above comment, Meta-Press.es is a libre software meta-search engine for the press, it's a WebExtension [mozilla.org] and it's fully decentralized. Meta-Press.es [meta-press.es] protects the privacy of users on a verifiable base (you don't have to trust that it's not saving your logs somewhere) : there is no Met
  • I've used duck duck go for years. I figure if I can't find it there, I don't need it anyway LOL
  • i type in 'brave"
    its not there

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