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This statement (second paragraph) > Ads are a key part of search engines, helping to facilitate the free and open exchange of information on the Web, and to co

This statement (second paragraph) > Ads are a key part of search engines, helping to facilitate the free and open exchange of information on the Web, and to connect users to helpful products and services related to their search terms. Is just non sequitur for me. It's said in such a smooth way, in such a gaslight-ish way, that your tempted to just accept it. But it actually makes no sense to me. I get what ads are key to: revenue, keeping the lights on, that sort of thing. But I don't see how they increase the free and open exchange of information on the web. If I sat down with a troubled couple who was having a hard time communicating, I wouldn't periodically interrupt and say "let's pause a moment for an ad. I think that's going to really open up a better and more free exchange between the both of you." I also don't understand how it is helpful in helping me connect to products and services in a helpful way. An index (yellow pages) of what's available would help me search for a product. A rating system that wasn't gamed might help me make a selection that was best for me. But ads? We inherently distrust that we're being swayed/manipulated by them. I need to update the insulation in my attic, so I'm in the market to get some newer insulation. To wit, I've called a number of people I know who are in the insulation/builder business to get their information. Not a single one said "well, here's my opinion, but what you really need to do is check the ads, they're going to be your best source of information about how to proceed."

hunterb123 4y ago
You've never opened a newspaper up to the classifieds? Those are ads. You may not know of a tree cutting service until you look there. You may not know where to get a car part until you look there. Having ads riddled throughout the internet is one thing, but having a directory where ads are supposed to be is another. Yes billboards are annoying, that doesn't make classifieds equal. (oh and you could just pay $3/mo or not use the service if you have no use for classifieds)
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  But there's a difference if you're searching for a tree cutting service in the yellow pages, or if you're googling a chainsaw sharpener, and you get a tree cutting service ad.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Is there? You are searching for keywords and paid information is presented usually in some order that puts paid items near the top and more visible.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      But i'm searching for a sharpener, not a tree cutting service. When I open youtube and click on the chainsaw sharpening tutorial video, i wasnt to see that video, not 6 ads for something i didn't search for and don't need.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        You wanted to see Golden Girls but they showed you ads on teeth glue before your program started? That is to be expected. You might not need it but someone thought enough viewers would to make it profitable
- dismalpedigree 4y ago
  If ads are truly so useful, perhaps they should withhold them unless you pay $3/mo. Oh right. They are a negative user experience and bring revenue in without providing any value (possibly negative value) to the user. Nothing groundbreaking here, but lets not pretend this is anything but a money grab.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    They do as most newspapers are not free at the newsstand. To get those local classified ads you have to pay. They can be a negative or positive depending on the ad and when/where you see it Some people love to see new products and ads show those.
    - squeaky-clean 4y ago
      There are some free ones but they're also 90% ads :p Then again I used to subscribe to tech magazines back in the day, and you can think of the articles and reviews as well thought out and curated ads. (At least the good magazines).
      - chrismorgan 4y ago
        My regional local paper (where “local” means “it’s headquartered in a town of 20,000 people 100km away from myself and has a catchment area of maybe 50,000 people”), titled The Weekly Advertiser, is consistently almost exactly 75% ads by surface area (measured on a few different occasions).
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Yep, back when I was into photography (which was well before the web existed) I would buy photography magazines mainly for the ads. Same with the Computer Shopper, it was almnost entirely ads and people paid for it.
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
- amelius 4y ago
  What you need is yellow pages.
yucky 4y ago
> But I don't see how they increase the free and open exchange of information on the web. I think I can help explain. Almost all search engine users (~95%+) only scan the first 10-20 results on a query, and those results are dominated by sites that have the budget to spend on SEO. Buying ads gives other voices a chance to break through. Depending on the niche it can be far more expensive to be on the first page of search results through long term SEO efforts than shorter term, campaign based PPC (paid ads) efforts. This is particularly true for search terms where it may not be known how valuable a top 5 or top 10 position is. It could take months or years and a ton of cash to rank for certain things through SEO efforts alone, only to discover the traffic isn't worth it. Alternatively, you could test that with PPC and discover quickly and far cheaper if you should spend your time and money trying to rank for something. This then gives smaller voices a chance to amplify.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  In actual practice those ad slots usually end up dominated by companies looking to take advantage of uninformed consumers (e.g. [1]). Sponsored search slots also introduce the perverse incentive of forcing people to pay for ads on their own results so that potential customers don't get stolen away by competitors' ads. Let's give a more real-world example, like say a search for 'fine dining restaurants' in Oakland. We'll use ad-ridden yelp as our example [2]. My expectation is that if quality restaurants are being given voices is that the sponsored list should be filled with Michelin starred or at least bib gourmand / equivalent restaurants. Instead the entire first page is sponsored breweries / bars and a burger joint (on a non-adblocking test browser). I have to scroll down to the initially-hidden search results to see Commis at #3. [1] https://doi.org/10.1086/676333 https://doi.org/10.1086/676333 [2] https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Fine+Dining+Restaurants&find_loc=Oakland%2C+CA https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Fine+Dining+Restaurant...
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Your expectations may not match reality. The target market for fine dining are not the type of people looking through search results on the internet for suggestions for dining. They will hear about through conversation or be introduced through a private network. If you have to advertise you already are attracting the wrong crowd.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
squeaky-clean 4y ago
> If I sat down with a troubled couple who was having a hard time communicating, I wouldn't periodically interrupt and say "let's pause a moment for an ad. I think that's going to really open up a better and more free exchange between the both of you." Couples counseling isn't free, maybe with ads they could be. I mean obviously not, but only because a professional counselor can only see about 8 couples per day while a search engine can serve several billion. Brave is saying it in a very PR / marketing speak way, but I get the underlying point. Instead of funding our service with your own money, let some big companies fund it in exchange for your attention. The unspoken issue (well it gets spoken on HN a lot) is that your searchers no longer become your customers. So it's advantageous to improve your service for the sake of the advertisers to the detriment of the searchers, at least until a threshold that would make the majority of them quit. It only benefits "free and open exchange of information" for as long as that also benefits the advertisers.
- SebastianKra 4y ago
  I hate that ads are now seen as a necessary evil for funding free access to services. The money still comes from you, just through the purchase of products. What's worse, if you pay for YouTube Premium or Kagi, you're effectively paying for your content twice. No wonder, poorer people can't afford that. I guess you could frame it like this: "Company are overcharging us by insane amounts anyways, so at least some of that money goes back into something useful through ads."
  - pempem 4y ago
    Its more pernicious imho. "Let us pay for this service by serving you ads which undermine your comprehension of what you actually need and cause you to constantly have an investigative part of your mind on, or mindlessly consume." Its truly more than walletshare and tremendously mentally taxing or can destroy your financial wellbeing if unchecked.
    - heresie-dabord 4y ago
      At this point, I feel you are understating the perniciousness. "We will expose you to advertising and claim for a time to conduct ethical oversight, but when the revenue is large enough, forcing the advertising on you will become our primary business. We will enable the surveillance economy and take money from any source however dubious."
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"An index (yellow pages) of what's available would help me search for a product." This is what "tech" companies are seeking to prevent. If the user has no idea of what's available, then the "tech" company can "suggest" its advertisers' products and services. "Recommendations" are supposed to be technologically indistinguishable from "search". Gaslighting indeed. But don't believe me. Get it from the horse's mouth. Read Google's brief in opposition in the Gonzalez case. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-1333/229391/20220705140634781_Gonzalez%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-1333/229391/202... Google wants the US Supreme Court to believe that recommendations systems and search engines are the same thing.1 If the justices were born into the world of Google, Facebook and now TikTok, that argument might work. But a majority were born before the www existed. The difference between search and recommendations is obvious and significant. "Tech" companies, which produce no content themselves, want to recommend whatever gets "eyeballs", so they can keep the lights on by selling online advertising services. Popularity is the all-important metric. They want to run websites that serve hundreds of millions of people, relegating the rest of the web's sites to brief tangents, temporary distractions. Why. Because those conditions are optimal for advertising. For a variety of reasons, they are unable to satisfactorily filter, curate, censor, etc. the content they collect from others. This only works as a lucrative racket so long as the "tech" company cannot be sued for the content they take from others and use as bait to lure in users to be targeted with advertising. Generally, the preaviling interpretation of Section 230 has effectively prevented such litigation. If that interpretation changes, it could spell the end of this enormous racket. Big Tech would not be able to continue to profit from user-generated content by steering web users toward what is popular and creating large audiences attractive to advertisers. Smaller websites that produce their own content could again become relevant. In the past, I have had personal projects where I create an alternative way to explore the www, using a Yellow Pages type of process. IMO, the reason no one seems to care about this area anymore2 is not that such projects are infeasible or too challenging, it is that there is no financial incentive to pursue them. Big Tech sold out the web. Big Tech has sought to portray the web as a 100% commercial network. It has thus become a sewer of low quality "content" and try-hard advertising, while the data collection, tracking and ad serving apparatus purchased with all that wasted ad spend is state of the art. 1. Because there is precedent that suggests 230 protects search engines. There is however no precedent that suggests it protects "recommendations". 2. I was recently looking at the original sources for WAIS on a simtel mirror. All the pieces were there. The www had so much potential. At least Brewster Kahle went on to do something useful, the Internet Archive. I still sometimes use z39.50 today to do searches on library databases. To me it represents a time before advertising infected computer networks and eventually the internet.
stereoradonc 4y ago
I immediately liked the way you described the snake-oil. Bravo!
karaterobot 4y ago
Yeah, that stuck out to me too. It immediately made me think of that famous quote from Larry Page and Sergey Brin that keeps biting them in the ass: > "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” That was from 1998, and obviously it's possible they were wrong, and today's Google (as well as Brave) are right that ads are actually integral to search. But, I don't think so, personally.
BrendanEich 4y ago
Thanks, you have a point. This sentence is trying to get across two separate ideas without doing the work, and its breezy style doesn't help. 1. Ad-free premium search is already an option with Brave Search, and the ads in the free leg we just launched are privacy-preserving, but none of this proves the "free and open exchange" claim. The "free" part was intended to mean no-payment-required, because many can't afford and some find ads useful. The "open" is thorny and should have been separated: all engines have biases even if algorithmic, from the Web they index if not how they weigh and measure inputs to their indexing. 2. Some folks do find ads useful (I do, on Google especially as its organic results have declined in quality since the old days, but even in the old days). These users will probably prefer the free leg on this basis, and that's what the last clause of this overlong sentence was trying to get across. We will do better in future posts. I hope the privacy-preserving nature of search ads is clear too -- if not, please reply and I'll take back your feedback there too.
- nroach 4y ago
  > Ad-free premium search is already an option with Brave Search Is the premium search ad-free in the sense that no user-derived data is utilized or extractable for advertising purposes? Or is it ad free in the sense that no ads are displayed to premium tier users, but user data can still be an input for ad measurement, conversion, and modeling?
  - BrendanEich 4y ago
    Brave search is private in no-user-identification and no-reidentification-via-record-unlinkability senses always, both legs: we do not build user profiles. As with all engines, we learn from head of query log and what link is clicked. That is an essential first party purpose, but we collect no personal data because nothing is linkable across queries and clicks to any person. If you opt into the Web Discovery Project (it's off by default and a separate setting; only in Brave), then your queries and clicks across all navigation are turned into anonymous data by dropping any with enough entropy to suspect they bear personal data, dropping IP and headers, and otherwise ensuring record-unlinkability. See https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-What-is-the-Web-Discovery-Project- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh... and https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/modules/web-discovery-project/sources/README.md https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/mod.... Because Premium Brave Search has no ads, it's not useful _per se_ for ad measurement, conversion, or modeling. But I took your question do mean "do premium search queries and outbound link clicks feed into the search engine?" -- they do. But no ads, and no way to model directly how an ad would perform, beyond the big data benefit that all search engine use to help ad sales and matching. Last thing: with off-by-default (opt-in) Brave Rewards user ads (push => new tab on click), the matching agent is in the browser, inactive until opt-in, off upon opt-out, and you can clear its history. Confirmations and revenue shares via Chaumian blind signature protocol (Privacy Pass uses same crypto alg). No server-side ad matching at all. Same for Brave News (for ads and all feeds, everything). With search ads, matching is server-side (after the edge proxy that drops IP etc.) based on only the query, device, country, and timezone. Anything more personalized, we can go to client-side matching and ad insertion. I hope this helps.
syntheweave 4y ago
I take an "ad-optimistic" stance. For the most part, the economy doesn't need a lot of ads in crowded markets: the brand of soft drink or toothpaste you buy isn't going to vary substantially, and any deal-breaker in a certain brand is one you'll pick up on without an ad. But the stuff you didn't even know existed is where ads can add something. Word of mouth doesn't always give the answers you need, especially as the subject matter becomes more private, sensitive, or trade-secretive. Some of the answers can be found by asking directly, but in many other cases, you need an introduction. Opting to keep some degree of advertisement in your life - in spaces where you want to "keep some feelers out" - could actually be a benefit because it means you will learn just that new things exist. The downside is that you may think the new thing is what you need, and it isn't. But that's probably most of consumerism. So your read on it will come down to whether you are "ad-optimistic" as I stated up front. An ad-pessimist will assume that nothing sold could be useful enough to bother listening to the pitch.
- dcow 4y ago
  I too find value in ads when I'm in a position to want to be exposed to advertisements. I don't understand why that should or need be the default experience. I pay for Kagi, it's quite nice. If I am feeling like I can't find a product I'm looking for and word of mouth isn't cutting it, then I may elect to expose myself to ads. I'd argue it's almost unethical to expose people to the manipulation that is consumer advertising without their consent.
carlivar 4y ago
It's funny you mentioned "yellow pages". The Yellow Pages were ads. Really just like a search engine. If you paid, you got a big, prominent listing in your category (or others). Otherwise you were relegated to the tiny alphabetical list.
yunohn 4y ago
> An index (yellow pages) of what's available would help me search for a product Why do you think a yellow pages of websites, with literally millions of results/pages, in alphabetic (?) order would be usable? Surely, you want some sort of ranking, filtering, reordering, etc curation? Do you google businesses to get their phone number, or do you whip out the local yellow pages directory and start flipping through its pages hoping it’s up to date…?
Terretta 4y ago
kagi.com

hunterb123 4y ago

You've never opened a newspaper up to the classifieds? Those are ads. You may not know of a tree cutting service until you look there. You may not know where to get a car part until you look there. Having ads riddled throughout the internet is one thing, but having a directory where ads are supposed to be is another. Yes billboards are annoying, that doesn't make classifieds equal. (oh and you could just pay $3/mo or not use the service if you have no use for classifieds)

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
But there's a difference if you're searching for a tree cutting service in the yellow pages, or if you're googling a chainsaw sharpener, and you get a tree cutting service ad.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Is there? You are searching for keywords and paid information is presented usually in some order that puts paid items near the top and more visible.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    But i'm searching for a sharpener, not a tree cutting service. When I open youtube and click on the chainsaw sharpening tutorial video, i wasnt to see that video, not 6 ads for something i didn't search for and don't need.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      You wanted to see Golden Girls but they showed you ads on teeth glue before your program started? That is to be expected. You might not need it but someone thought enough viewers would to make it profitable
dismalpedigree 4y ago
If ads are truly so useful, perhaps they should withhold them unless you pay $3/mo. Oh right. They are a negative user experience and bring revenue in without providing any value (possibly negative value) to the user. Nothing groundbreaking here, but lets not pretend this is anything but a money grab.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ipaddr 4y ago
  They do as most newspapers are not free at the newsstand. To get those local classified ads you have to pay. They can be a negative or positive depending on the ad and when/where you see it Some people love to see new products and ads show those.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    There are some free ones but they're also 90% ads :p Then again I used to subscribe to tech magazines back in the day, and you can think of the articles and reviews as well thought out and curated ads. (At least the good magazines).
    - chrismorgan 4y ago
      My regional local paper (where “local” means “it’s headquartered in a town of 20,000 people 100km away from myself and has a catchment area of maybe 50,000 people”), titled The Weekly Advertiser, is consistently almost exactly 75% ads by surface area (measured on a few different occasions).
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Yep, back when I was into photography (which was well before the web existed) I would buy photography magazines mainly for the ads. Same with the Computer Shopper, it was almnost entirely ads and people paid for it.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
amelius 4y ago
What you need is yellow pages.

yucky 4y ago

> But I don't see how they increase the free and open exchange of information on the web. I think I can help explain. Almost all search engine users (~95%+) only scan the first 10-20 results on a query, and those results are dominated by sites that have the budget to spend on SEO. Buying ads gives other voices a chance to break through. Depending on the niche it can be far more expensive to be on the first page of search results through long term SEO efforts than shorter term, campaign based PPC (paid ads) efforts. This is particularly true for search terms where it may not be known how valuable a top 5 or top 10 position is. It could take months or years and a ton of cash to rank for certain things through SEO efforts alone, only to discover the traffic isn't worth it. Alternatively, you could test that with PPC and discover quickly and far cheaper if you should spend your time and money trying to rank for something. This then gives smaller voices a chance to amplify.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
In actual practice those ad slots usually end up dominated by companies looking to take advantage of uninformed consumers (e.g. [1]). Sponsored search slots also introduce the perverse incentive of forcing people to pay for ads on their own results so that potential customers don't get stolen away by competitors' ads. Let's give a more real-world example, like say a search for 'fine dining restaurants' in Oakland. We'll use ad-ridden yelp as our example [2]. My expectation is that if quality restaurants are being given voices is that the sponsored list should be filled with Michelin starred or at least bib gourmand / equivalent restaurants. Instead the entire first page is sponsored breweries / bars and a burger joint (on a non-adblocking test browser). I have to scroll down to the initially-hidden search results to see Commis at #3. [1] https://doi.org/10.1086/676333 https://doi.org/10.1086/676333 [2] https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Fine+Dining+Restaurants&find_loc=Oakland%2C+CA https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Fine+Dining+Restaurant...
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Your expectations may not match reality. The target market for fine dining are not the type of people looking through search results on the internet for suggestions for dining. They will hear about through conversation or be introduced through a private network. If you have to advertise you already are attracting the wrong crowd.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

squeaky-clean 4y ago

> If I sat down with a troubled couple who was having a hard time communicating, I wouldn't periodically interrupt and say "let's pause a moment for an ad. I think that's going to really open up a better and more free exchange between the both of you." Couples counseling isn't free, maybe with ads they could be. I mean obviously not, but only because a professional counselor can only see about 8 couples per day while a search engine can serve several billion. Brave is saying it in a very PR / marketing speak way, but I get the underlying point. Instead of funding our service with your own money, let some big companies fund it in exchange for your attention. The unspoken issue (well it gets spoken on HN a lot) is that your searchers no longer become your customers. So it's advantageous to improve your service for the sake of the advertisers to the detriment of the searchers, at least until a threshold that would make the majority of them quit. It only benefits "free and open exchange of information" for as long as that also benefits the advertisers.

SebastianKra 4y ago
I hate that ads are now seen as a necessary evil for funding free access to services. The money still comes from you, just through the purchase of products. What's worse, if you pay for YouTube Premium or Kagi, you're effectively paying for your content twice. No wonder, poorer people can't afford that. I guess you could frame it like this: "Company are overcharging us by insane amounts anyways, so at least some of that money goes back into something useful through ads."
- pempem 4y ago
  Its more pernicious imho. "Let us pay for this service by serving you ads which undermine your comprehension of what you actually need and cause you to constantly have an investigative part of your mind on, or mindlessly consume." Its truly more than walletshare and tremendously mentally taxing or can destroy your financial wellbeing if unchecked.
  - heresie-dabord 4y ago
    At this point, I feel you are understating the perniciousness. "We will expose you to advertising and claim for a time to conduct ethical oversight, but when the revenue is large enough, forcing the advertising on you will become our primary business. We will enable the surveillance economy and take money from any source however dubious."

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"An index (yellow pages) of what's available would help me search for a product." This is what "tech" companies are seeking to prevent. If the user has no idea of what's available, then the "tech" company can "suggest" its advertisers' products and services. "Recommendations" are supposed to be technologically indistinguishable from "search". Gaslighting indeed. But don't believe me. Get it from the horse's mouth. Read Google's brief in opposition in the Gonzalez case. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-1333/229391/20220705140634781_Gonzalez%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-1333/229391/202... Google wants the US Supreme Court to believe that recommendations systems and search engines are the same thing.1 If the justices were born into the world of Google, Facebook and now TikTok, that argument might work. But a majority were born before the www existed. The difference between search and recommendations is obvious and significant. "Tech" companies, which produce no content themselves, want to recommend whatever gets "eyeballs", so they can keep the lights on by selling online advertising services. Popularity is the all-important metric. They want to run websites that serve hundreds of millions of people, relegating the rest of the web's sites to brief tangents, temporary distractions. Why. Because those conditions are optimal for advertising. For a variety of reasons, they are unable to satisfactorily filter, curate, censor, etc. the content they collect from others. This only works as a lucrative racket so long as the "tech" company cannot be sued for the content they take from others and use as bait to lure in users to be targeted with advertising. Generally, the preaviling interpretation of Section 230 has effectively prevented such litigation. If that interpretation changes, it could spell the end of this enormous racket. Big Tech would not be able to continue to profit from user-generated content by steering web users toward what is popular and creating large audiences attractive to advertisers. Smaller websites that produce their own content could again become relevant. In the past, I have had personal projects where I create an alternative way to explore the www, using a Yellow Pages type of process. IMO, the reason no one seems to care about this area anymore2 is not that such projects are infeasible or too challenging, it is that there is no financial incentive to pursue them. Big Tech sold out the web. Big Tech has sought to portray the web as a 100% commercial network. It has thus become a sewer of low quality "content" and try-hard advertising, while the data collection, tracking and ad serving apparatus purchased with all that wasted ad spend is state of the art. 1. Because there is precedent that suggests 230 protects search engines. There is however no precedent that suggests it protects "recommendations". 2. I was recently looking at the original sources for WAIS on a simtel mirror. All the pieces were there. The www had so much potential. At least Brewster Kahle went on to do something useful, the Internet Archive. I still sometimes use z39.50 today to do searches on library databases. To me it represents a time before advertising infected computer networks and eventually the internet.

stereoradonc 4y ago

I immediately liked the way you described the snake-oil. Bravo!

karaterobot 4y ago

Yeah, that stuck out to me too. It immediately made me think of that famous quote from Larry Page and Sergey Brin that keeps biting them in the ass: > "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” That was from 1998, and obviously it's possible they were wrong, and today's Google (as well as Brave) are right that ads are actually integral to search. But, I don't think so, personally.

BrendanEich 4y ago

Thanks, you have a point. This sentence is trying to get across two separate ideas without doing the work, and its breezy style doesn't help. 1. Ad-free premium search is already an option with Brave Search, and the ads in the free leg we just launched are privacy-preserving, but none of this proves the "free and open exchange" claim. The "free" part was intended to mean no-payment-required, because many can't afford and some find ads useful. The "open" is thorny and should have been separated: all engines have biases even if algorithmic, from the Web they index if not how they weigh and measure inputs to their indexing. 2. Some folks do find ads useful (I do, on Google especially as its organic results have declined in quality since the old days, but even in the old days). These users will probably prefer the free leg on this basis, and that's what the last clause of this overlong sentence was trying to get across. We will do better in future posts. I hope the privacy-preserving nature of search ads is clear too -- if not, please reply and I'll take back your feedback there too.

nroach 4y ago
> Ad-free premium search is already an option with Brave Search Is the premium search ad-free in the sense that no user-derived data is utilized or extractable for advertising purposes? Or is it ad free in the sense that no ads are displayed to premium tier users, but user data can still be an input for ad measurement, conversion, and modeling?
- BrendanEich 4y ago
  Brave search is private in no-user-identification and no-reidentification-via-record-unlinkability senses always, both legs: we do not build user profiles. As with all engines, we learn from head of query log and what link is clicked. That is an essential first party purpose, but we collect no personal data because nothing is linkable across queries and clicks to any person. If you opt into the Web Discovery Project (it's off by default and a separate setting; only in Brave), then your queries and clicks across all navigation are turned into anonymous data by dropping any with enough entropy to suspect they bear personal data, dropping IP and headers, and otherwise ensuring record-unlinkability. See https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-What-is-the-Web-Discovery-Project- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh... and https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/modules/web-discovery-project/sources/README.md https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/mod.... Because Premium Brave Search has no ads, it's not useful _per se_ for ad measurement, conversion, or modeling. But I took your question do mean "do premium search queries and outbound link clicks feed into the search engine?" -- they do. But no ads, and no way to model directly how an ad would perform, beyond the big data benefit that all search engine use to help ad sales and matching. Last thing: with off-by-default (opt-in) Brave Rewards user ads (push => new tab on click), the matching agent is in the browser, inactive until opt-in, off upon opt-out, and you can clear its history. Confirmations and revenue shares via Chaumian blind signature protocol (Privacy Pass uses same crypto alg). No server-side ad matching at all. Same for Brave News (for ads and all feeds, everything). With search ads, matching is server-side (after the edge proxy that drops IP etc.) based on only the query, device, country, and timezone. Anything more personalized, we can go to client-side matching and ad insertion. I hope this helps.

syntheweave 4y ago

I take an "ad-optimistic" stance. For the most part, the economy doesn't need a lot of ads in crowded markets: the brand of soft drink or toothpaste you buy isn't going to vary substantially, and any deal-breaker in a certain brand is one you'll pick up on without an ad. But the stuff you didn't even know existed is where ads can add something. Word of mouth doesn't always give the answers you need, especially as the subject matter becomes more private, sensitive, or trade-secretive. Some of the answers can be found by asking directly, but in many other cases, you need an introduction. Opting to keep some degree of advertisement in your life - in spaces where you want to "keep some feelers out" - could actually be a benefit because it means you will learn just that new things exist. The downside is that you may think the new thing is what you need, and it isn't. But that's probably most of consumerism. So your read on it will come down to whether you are "ad-optimistic" as I stated up front. An ad-pessimist will assume that nothing sold could be useful enough to bother listening to the pitch.

dcow 4y ago
I too find value in ads when I'm in a position to want to be exposed to advertisements. I don't understand why that should or need be the default experience. I pay for Kagi, it's quite nice. If I am feeling like I can't find a product I'm looking for and word of mouth isn't cutting it, then I may elect to expose myself to ads. I'd argue it's almost unethical to expose people to the manipulation that is consumer advertising without their consent.

carlivar 4y ago

It's funny you mentioned "yellow pages". The Yellow Pages were ads. Really just like a search engine. If you paid, you got a big, prominent listing in your category (or others). Otherwise you were relegated to the tiny alphabetical list.

yunohn 4y ago

> An index (yellow pages) of what's available would help me search for a product Why do you think a yellow pages of websites, with literally millions of results/pages, in alphabetic (?) order would be usable? Surely, you want some sort of ranking, filtering, reordering, etc curation? Do you google businesses to get their phone number, or do you whip out the local yellow pages directory and start flipping through its pages hoping it’s up to date…?

Terretta 4y ago

kagi.com