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Author Topic: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine  (Read 1858 times)

rcjordan

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Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« on: March 03, 2021, 11:53:03 PM »
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Brad

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #1 on: March 04, 2021, 12:46:15 AM »
I've never heard of Tailcat.

If they can deliver a search engine with it's own index then good.  The more the better.
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littleman

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #2 on: March 04, 2021, 01:19:08 AM »
>The more the better.

Yeah, sure would be nice if they got some market share.
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Brad

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #3 on: March 04, 2021, 11:45:57 AM »
> market share

I'm not sure how popular Brave browser is but it will give Brave search a built in audience when it launches.  I've never used Brave.  Everytime I've looked at their website, something makes me cautious.  I'm a bit cautious about this search engine announcement too, because it takes a long time to build a useful sized index by crawling and then you have the whole ranking thing.  But if they can do it I'll rejoice in their good fortune.

To me it's all about having a healthier web.  Back before Google when we had 6 or 8 search engines I could get some of my pages ranking in about half the engines (I never could get all of them) and still get traffic.  I'd like to see the web get back to 5 or 6 indexing search engines at a minimum because Google is going to continue to hog most of the serps above the fold for their own pages.  It might be a pain in the a##, but multiple major search engines is better for SEO in the long run.
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Brad

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #4 on: March 04, 2021, 01:21:38 PM »
A bit more on the Brave index from Wired:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/brave-browser-search

Quote
“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.

“It's the web that the users care about,” says Eich. “You don't have to crawl the entire web in quasi-real time as Google does.”

I think he's wrong.  I played with Cliqz and it gave you like the first page or two of search results as long as the query wasn't too deep or complex.  I think that will wear thin over time.
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BoL

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #5 on: March 04, 2021, 02:48:11 PM »
Cliqz had a few of their blog posts featured on HN (or rather, they were keen to share them on there)
https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-from-scratch.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=0x65.dev
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Brad

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #6 on: March 05, 2021, 12:49:57 PM »
Some more info:

Quote
“Google’s ‘long tail’ is hard for any engine to beat but we have a plan to compete on that front too, once integrated into the Brave browser,” he told us in an email interview,

https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/03/brave-is-launching-its-own-search-engine-with-the-help-of-ex-cliqz-devs-and-tech/

Could this mean a backfill?  Like when AV, Inktomi or Google were backfill for Yahoo?
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BoL

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #7 on: March 15, 2021, 09:31:51 AM »
Remembered that thing that bugged me about Cliqz. They trained their algo by forking firefox and logging queries done on Google by users of the browser to train their algo. Had me wondering if they'd potentially get into legal bother for that.
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Brad

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Re: Brave is developing its own privacy-focused search engine
« Reply #8 on: March 15, 2021, 10:06:16 AM »
> Cliqz

I tried their browser/search engine when they came out, and found the whole rational for the thing convoluted.  The search engine was fine for brands and navigational searches but only had 2 pages of serps.  No depth at all.

Brave "search" will get hung out to dry on search engine discussion groups.  There are searchers that can't stand Bing and say it has no depth and I can only imagine what the response will be to Brave.
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