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Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google
- kuu 6y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328872
- fsflover 6y agoAlso: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758
- vertis 6y agoThis is just false though. There are several privacy preserving search engines out there. The fact that they're not owned by a browser vendor is irrelevant. It's also annoying suggesting that it's even necessary for the search engine to be owned by the browser vendor. This may well be part of Brave's plan with regard to BAT (basic attention token), or some other form of monetization but it does little for the end consumer.
- malthejorgensen 6y agoHeadline is a bit rich, since duckduckgo exists (and Bing/Microsoft if you really stretch it). I get the point though -- duckduckgo doesn't provide a browser. But I'm guessing Brave doesn't provide hosted email service (Gmail), file and document hosting (Google Drive and Docs) so the analogy breaks down either way. That snark being said, I do want more privacy on the web -- so yay Brave!
- vertis 6y agoThis was my first response as well (and posted a sibling that said the same).
- mikepurvis 6y agoDo we know if DDG passes through every query on demand, or does it have a caching layer or something where popular queries only hit Microsoft once a day?
- ffpip 6y agoBing search API terms of use do not allow caching [0]. "You must use results you obtain through the Services only in Internet Search Experiences (as defined in the use and display requirements) and must not cache or copy results. " But they may have a special agreement in place due to the number of searches happening on DDG (100 million + daily [1]). They're larger than Bing in many countries. [0] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal [1] - https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
- ehsankia 6y agoDoes it matter? If it's proxied through a single API "user", Microsoft can't track individual DDG users, right?
- mikepurvis 6y agoI think it still matters— maybe it's way harder to track an individual user, but you could still do some inference about queries which lead to other queries, or watching for bursts/crescendos of traffic on a particular topic in response to current events.
- ehsankia 6y agoYour first claim, I'm suspicious this can be done after a certain scale. If DDG is sending queries from millions of users, it's much harder to untangle them. Your second query, absolutely, Microsoft is getting very good aggregated data from their API, which is useful to them, but that's not really a privacy violation for individual users.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
- katsura 6y ago> duckduckgo doesn't provide a browser That's not entirely true. They do have a browser for Android and iOS[0]. When I search they frequently show a small pop-up to install it. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/duckduckgo-privacy-browser/id663592361 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/duckduckgo-privacy-browser/id6...
- elnygren 6y agoCurrent title "Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google" seems quite misleading since there are plenty of private alternatives to Google (search engine) already ? Especially for english speaking programming and news etc. searches, https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com is really good.
- blocked_again 6y agoDuckDuckGo uses bing for search.
- yammajr 6y agoFrom what I understand, DDG uses bing as a primary source, but they also pull data from numerous other sources, including their own crawler. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
- electrondood 6y agoYou can choose what DuckDuckGo uses for search, including anonymous proxying of search queries to Google.
- iKevinShah 6y agowhere can we do this? All searches result in "DuckDuck vs Google" , how ddg is better etc.
- vertis 6y agostartpage.com as well.
- Daho0n 6y agoNow owned by an advertisement / tracking company. No thanks.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- imwillofficial 6y agoIt's about time google had some competition that might just pull off a great competing service.
- imwillofficial 6y agoDefine "private"
- vertis 6y agoDefinite "alternative" as well :) Pretty sure Brave is built on Chromium which might not have Google embedded, but it's still Google owned.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alangibson 6y agoThe much more specific full title of the post is less wrong. "Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google Search and Google Chrome on both mobile and desktop"
- Daho0n 6y agoLess wrong but still false.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoThat's technically probably true but not a lot better. DuckDuckGo is a private alternative search engine and they already have a mobile browser, so literally the only part that makes it work is "and alternative to Chrome on desktop". You can claim that DDG doesn't count because it uses bing for some of its backend (not exclusively, they do run their own crawler plus other sources IIRC), but then I get to throw out the Brave browser since it's a Blink ... actually, more than just using blink, isn't it outright a Chromium fork even for the frontend?
- nealdotpy 6y agoI use Brave and DuckDuckGo (bing) as my primary coupled search engine. However, sometimes when I am trying to find resources on a particular issue/library/framework, I have to invoke :g (google search) in order to find those results; otherwise, thy're absent from the DDG searches. Until this is addressed, the search really won't be that competitive, unless this is some weird niche thing that I think is more widespread than it is?
- Daho0n 6y agoWhat a clickbait and clearly false headline. Sadly this is very like Brave to claim things that are on the wrong side of the truth. It's like there's some kind of inferiority complex at Brave that shows it face from time to time.
- kapsteur 6y agoThe Cliqz Tech blog : https://0x65.dev https://0x65.dev contains many informations about how their constructed their private search engine.
- NVHacker 6y agoThat's very brave, isn't it ?