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"The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option..." How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned
by jerf 6y ago
"The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option..."
How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can't believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it's free. But if I'm a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you're doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn't be worth losing me as a customer.
I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there.
- jhoechtl 6y agoThere is a cost in order to be free(ed). Would be a nice study to determine the monthly rate one is willing to pay in order not to the be the service.
- Terretta 6y agoPerhaps the going rate could be established in "units of text editor subscription". How much time do you spend in search bar and results versus one of several non-coding text editors that you subscribe to? Price accordingly.
- ohduran 6y ago100% this. There is a glass ceiling to the quality of a search engine if it's free; it starts with G. The paid option hasn't been explored yet, and for good reason I think: in principle, you need training data for it to be any good. And, again in principle, the only way to amass user data is for the service to be free, leveraging that to sharpen the tool. So in principle, I reckon this is doomed to fail. But I might be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. And that's enough.
- gtirloni 6y agoWhat kind of training are the users providing that makes G better? I thought their secret was that they have better infrastructure to crawl and organize information? I don't see how a paid search engine has a disadvantage here.
- nitrogen 6y agoEvery time you click a result link, and every time you bounce back from that link, probably also scroll position and hovering, you are providing potentially useful training data.
- pizzapill 6y agoOne very simple metric to improve search results is testing how long a user visits a site. When users search for something, click a link and return to google seconds later you can assume that the result did not match what the user was searching for.
- hedora 6y agoThen why aren’t Google results any better (arguably worse) than search engines that don’t do this?
- schnable 6y agoThey are better IME - I use DDG but still need to switch to Google for many searches to find what I'm looking for.
- Daho0n 6y agoThey are better. Maybe not to you but there's a reason Google is as big as it is. DDG, Bing, etc. are just awful.
- prionassembly 6y agoBecause they're so dominant they can make changes to the system that make it worse. Haven't you noticed the decline in quality of Google search results over these past few years?
- dimes 6y agoSimply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, except in cases like DDG or Brave that stake their reputation on privacy. For instance, I pay for groceries, yet my grocery store tracks my purchases and sells that information. We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed.
- jerf 6y agoIt is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There's no way to convince me you aren't tracking if it's free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me. Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402
- ehsankia 6y ago> It is necessary, but not sufficient Doesn't DDG contradict that?
- SiempreViernes 6y agoI'm not sure DDG can be considered an example of the default position in the search market. Granted, OP didn't explicitly state they were discussing the most common behaviour in the market, but it remains a stretch to take them to be be stating a law that must be strictly true for any social construct that could be called a market.
- aloisdg 6y ago> As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy. Not if the project is a non-profit. Wikipedia is free and privacy friendly (or pay what you want through donation if you want).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wayne 6y agoMy views similarly changed on email. It would have been inconceivable for me to pay for email 10 years ago. Now I'm happy to pay for a service that does the basics well, is primarily considering my interests, and will have competent customer service if something goes wrong.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoWhat if it's less profitable to run a paid search engine? Will they run both free/paid side-by-side? And how can one be certain they won't profit off the query data on the backend anyways? Is there any reason I should think Brave won't prioritize profit motives first in 5, 10 years when investors or markets expect returns?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hoolihan 6y agoPaid services have the real name and credit card. It's too risky to assume they won't turn evil in the future. I barely trust my ISP.
- xtracto 6y agoBack in the day (late 90s) there was a company called Copernic that had a good search engine with a REALLY good desktop client. I remember being able to do all sort of filters, sorting and crazy searches. IIRC It was paid, and it was really way ahead of the simple search operations you can even currently do with Google (actually, Google has constantly removed search abilities as time goes by, like for example, anyone remember when Google Search could show tweeter search results? or that you could "block" domains from search results)
- Bjartr 6y agoOn that last point, searches like `-site:example.com` looks like they still work.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoHonestly, there should be some sort of never-forget meme about Google removing the + operator when they started up their stupid social network that failed and then never put it back >:( Just checked wikipedia, and it seems it'll be ten years ago this June that google stole + and forced quoting upon us for pure vanity reasons.
- napo 6y agoIf someone is wondering (like I did) what the + operator was for: foo +bar +baz was equivalent to foo "bar" "baz"
- jdsully 6y agoIt stood for logical AND, so really your search term would be read as: foo AND bar AND baz. It would be more accurate to type it as foo + bar + baz.
- TheRealSteel 6y agoThey've unfortunately conflated "must have" and "spelled exactly", which aren't the same thing.
- eznzt 6y agoSo basically a search engine that is worse than Google and that I will have to pay for. Sign me right up!!
- tylersmith 6y agoI've really 180'd on this over the past two years. I've always loved business models that allowed free access, but now I'm very much focused on a business models that are sustainable, and without relying on being able to sell my data to keep the lights on. A service I can pay for access, in a sustainable business arrangement, is my new preferred model.
- solso 6y agoThere 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 https://0x65.dev, some of them covering how signals are collected, data, but no tracking. I did work at Cliqz and now I work at Brave. I can tell for a fact, that all data was, is and will be, record-unlinkable. That means that no-one, not me, not the government, not the ad department can reconstruct a session with your activity. Again, there is no tracking, full anonymity, Brave would not do it any other way.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoPlease let us know if that changes. Brave buying Cliqz is the first corporate acquisition that's actually made me feel better about the acquirer, ever. I have no idea how to react to that. Keeping up the dev blog would probably make me start recommending Brave, where before I recommended against it. Incidentally, do you know what's happening to the Cliqz browser?
- BrendanEich 6y agohttps://www.burda.com/en/news/cliqz-closes-areas-browser-and-search-technologies/ https://www.burda.com/en/news/cliqz-closes-areas-browser-and...
- Technetium 6y agoInteresting post https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-from-cliqz
- michaelbrave 6y agogive me the option to block certain sites from results and prioritize others, I would pay a monthly fee just for that level of customization. I hate searching to download something and only finding spam in the top 5 results.
- Seb-C 6y agoI was going to say something similar. I'm convinced that it's possible to build a better search engine than Google by using community-influenced results, rather than try to do magic. I'd definitely pay for a search engine where we can collectively downvote to hell any SEO spam. That would be the only way to incentivize sites to provide actual quality rather than cheating the algorithms.
- IgorPartola 6y agoConsider that it’s not just the changing times but also your own changing economic situation. Would you have had a spare $20/month foe a search engine subscription as a 16 year old? I sure had better uses for my money back then than something like this, privacy be damned.
- jcpham2 6y agobat tokens will eventually make sense to everyone we’re probably just 10 years too early into the private browsing space
- boogies 6y ago> I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Right now you can pay to host an instance of the internet meta-search engine SearX: https://searx.github.io/searx/ https://searx.github.io/searx/
- glitchc 6y agoCable in the 1980s comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv... Short answer: Yes, there will be ads eventually, even if you pay for it.
- addicted 6y agoI do think that fewer things need to be free. But there’s no reason to believe that free means we must lose our privacy. OTA television, for example, had been providing decades worth of extremely expensive programming for free. And this lost us absolutely no privacy. There is no reason that ads have to invade our privacy. They can go back to targeting based on broad geographical and age demographics. Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say the government passes a law that says that ads cannot be based on any factors more privacy invasive than your zip code and 10 year age range. It’s not like companies would stop paying for ads. They would pay less, but probably still enough to maintain free services, like Google did in its initial days.
- asddubs 6y agothere's also lots of smaller niche platforms/services that don't, sometimes even funded exclusively by donations. I think the size of the organization has a lot to do with the likelihood that your data is getting harvested as well.
- jcims 6y agoI don't really even want to think what I would pay Google to access their search engine if they made it a paid service tomorrow.
- asddubs 6y agoi would probably just switch to bing or duckduckgo (aka bing) at this point. google used to be unparalleled in finding what you're actually looking for but their search results have steadily been getting worse.
- bogwog 6y ago> I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there. I wonder if that's because they're using Bing search results rather than crawling the web themselves?
- hlava 6y agohave you heard of greed? Do you think they care about loosing customers in that scenario? Where will they go? Dont be soo naive... they might start with honest and clean intentions but that will most likely change, or the pople running the company will change, people are soo easily corupted, especialy in a world filled with vice
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoI would not get too excited until you read the agreement they present you with. If you are a paying customer and they make promises, such as privacy-related ones, then those could theoretically be enforceable, with quantifiable damages at least equal to what you have paid. Will they accept that potential liability. Google won't. If Brave breaks their privacy promises to millions of paying end users, will they try to prevent the possibility of class-actions when potentially hundreds, maybe thousands or more of them all simultaneously "ask for their money back". Does paying by itself magically transform empty promises into kept ones What if the promisor can break the promise and keep the payments.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI don't really mind the ads on search engine as long as they aren't tracked and are based on the search. This is the way startpage does it.
- partiallypro 6y agoIt's still kinda not private, because GTM/GA/ etc on 3rd party sites are going to track where your click came from.
- BrendanEich 6y agoWe block all those. Were you thinking of other browsers?
- jojobas 6y agoMany things are free, such as Linux kernel and Debian distro. However if someone's expenses grow with userbase, everything you said is right.
- anonytrary 6y ago> As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy. Paid is still centralized. Decentralization isn't an answer, because people make their own decisions and a collective decision contains a lot of power. The only way to achieve true decentralization is to eliminate communication entirely. I believe it is referred to "Babel's tower". Centralization means we have no freedom and no privacy. With decentralization, 51% could conspire to murder the 49%. That experiment, taken after a few iterations, would quickly turn us extinct.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoThe idea is interesting. My view on the economics side is that the flaw is that this is a for profit company trying something new to make more profit. There's nothing wrong with that except that what they are selling is a commodity (bing, google, duck duck go, ..). So, that doesn't sound like a sound plan. In fact it sounds a lot like everything Mozilla tried and failed to make money with in the last few years. Maybe users will pay for X .... nope they won't pay for X either. Ironically, Mozilla's main business remains reselling Google's search. What's Brave's business model at this point? I'm assuming that the attention token business is at this point not really delivering substantial revenue. Anyway, a couple of weaknesses here with both these business models (search and BAT): - They are tied to Brave the browser, which while popular has a tiny market share. So, both solutions are cut off from the vast majority of users, including the fraction of a percent likely to be an early adopter of this (i.e. by actually paying). Fractions of fractions don't add up to a whole lot of revenue. - That browser happens to be built by Google and also depended upon by Apple & Microsoft (i.e. Chromium). Between those three, they control access to most of the users via their apps stores and operating systems. They also control the main contenders Cliqz is supposed to compete with: Google, Bing & DDG (which is Bing). That sounds like an uncomfortable place to be as a would be competitor. Also, there's the Apple and Google tax to worry about with any kind of revenue: Brave users putting more cash in the coffers of Apple and Google basically. - Users might pay for quality. That raises the question how you will get that. DDG is popular but a key reason for people to not use it remains that sometimes they just aren't good enough. And it's basically Bing, which depends on MS putting loads of cash and resources in it. I found myself reaching for Google a lot in the half year I used it until ultimately I decided that I did not have time for too many fruitless searches where I wasted time before ending up finding what I needed on Google. I reverted back to Google. And that's not because I enjoy being tracked or in their clutches: they are just that good. - Brave as a walled garden for exclusive paid features does not make sense: it's too small. Both BAT and search as commercially offered features would have more users (and thus paying users) if they weren't tied to Brave the browser. IMHO both would actually need to be structured under a non profit organization for long term success (for users, not for Brave).
- ChrisRR 6y agoMy opinion has definitely changed over the last 10 years from I'll use anything if it's free, to I'm willing to pay for a better service. Spotify is something I'll gladly pay for because it just works and is less hassle than ads and playlists and searching for youtube videos.
- csunbird 6y agoI would like to say, paying customers have even more valuable tracking data, since it signals that you have good disposable income.