> 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."
> 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.
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."
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.
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."
That's not true. Almost all high quality channels on Youtube have some sort of sponsorship inside the video. It doesn't go away even if you pay for Youtube red.
To clarify: When you pay to remove ads, you're still paying indirectly for the production and delivery of ads. Just because you didn't see an advertisement from Apple doesn't mean you're not going to buy from them.
So you now pay the cost of producing and delivering ads _as well as_ a premium so that you won't have to see them.
It's like paying for the construction of a guillotine and then pay to not have to stick your head in it.
Of course this is a simplified view: Not all companies benefit equally from advertising. Not all companies spend equally on ads, etc...
Only if you use SponsorBlock. Something something LTTStore.com (okay I've actually bought mech from them, but it's like 3x per episode plus the hardware sponsor segment).
You're not forced to buy any products, though. And in this case they specifically allow you to pay $3/month and not have ads. I'd wager virtually no one will take that option, though, since folks tend to be very vocally opposed to ads until it's time to pay instead.
Instead of funding our service with your own money, let some big companies fund it in exchange for your attention.
The big companies are not magically getting their money out of thin air, you are still paying with your money, just indirectly through the share of the ad budget included in the price of everything you buy. Some of the money gets lost on the way to pay the marketing people, some of the money goes to the web sites. But it is not enough that they now have your money, no, you also have to look at the stuff the marketing people made with your money in order to see the content you payed for. And this is still not enough, they also want every last bit of information about you, so that they can annoy you in a more targeted way. And last but not least, there are no real incentives that the ads represent the product objectively but there are incentives to overpromise and manipulate you.
> Couples counseling isn't free, maybe with ads they could be.
Ads can only pay a couple of dollars at most. That's one of the problem with ads: they don't scale. You can only sell cheapish stuff using them; you can never increase your price above a certain point. It's very much a broken form of monetization in many ways.
I've done ad stuff for a bank doing small to medium business loans. Over $100 per click on certain ads. It's insane. But we also had a high "quality score" (about 3% of clicks lead to a loan over 100k)
> Couples counseling isn't free, maybe with ads they could be.
I'm going to take a short break from our session to tell you guys that this session was sponsored by NordVPN, the only VPN you'll ever need. Co-sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends, an amazing MMORPG that you guys should really give a try.
"And by the way," said the counsellor, "Everything that we have discussed in this session is confidential, of course. But the word means nothing because I don't know how to implement privacy controls, you weren't using a VPN, and I'll monetise everything about your visit. Thanks for your business!"
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Ads give other voices with money to spend a chance to break through. This is very far from anything relevant either to "free" or "open" web interactions.
have you not navigated around the modern web? It’s virtually full of SEO spam. An entire profession has been created around the space, the SEO space is a cat and mouse game with Google’s algo. It is dominated by large firms with enough $ to have a team of SEO pros and tons of content.
If you re-read my post I think it will make more sense. Ranking naturally (SEO) often costs FAR more, so running even a small paid campaign can help those with smaller pockets strategically focus their efforts and is often the only option they realistically have.
"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.
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.
> 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. 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 has sold out the web.
Yes. I’m thinking about some ways to do this for specific niches. I suspect it will need to be non-profit. For revenue, I’m leaning towards something like affiliate links. Basically, third parties can pay to offer a generic way to take action on a particular thing. The site may provide several similar options, but by paying you go to the top of the list.
Since the main value of the site is documenting the thing, the monetization is strictly supplemental.
> 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…?
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
Not the biggest fan of Brave myself, but they seem to actually get extra points in my eyes for adding the paid option. It's not like you can pay $3 to Google to get them to stop surveilling you.
On a bigger note, monetizing search without ads seem to be a pretty tricky business model. Especially if you want to move beyond being a niche product; even an average HN reader would be hard to convince to pay for a regular subscription, so with the general public I can't imaging the hassle.
What are other ways search engines could monetize without taking money either from users or from people that want to show something to them?
It's a slippery slope though. We saw this with Google, so it's not like it's a straw man. First it's small, discrete ads to the side. Then it's the first few entries are ads, but are marked as such. Then it's the first page of entries. Then the marking disappears. (Yeah, they put it back eventually after a backlash. I wouldn't expect a company like Brave to do the same, though.)
I just go with a search engine I pay for that doesn't offer any ad-supported stuff (kagi.com). That way, I'm directly supporting the service, and they have zero incentive to start showing me stuff that other people are paying for me to see and which I definitely don't want to see.
It's a very good point that companies will (eventually) look to maximize revenue and thus even companies that start out with grand ideas of being "different" succumb to that pressure.
A strong countervailing force (in some markets) is competition. If Google had more competition (both in terms of a independent search service and access to be the default search option in browsers) they might have to start caring more about the search experience and privacy.
> I wouldn't expect a company like Brave to do the same, though.
Companies change. When the leadership/guard at a company changes, or with enough investor pressure, policies can easily change from benevolent to a money grab.
> It's not like you can pay $3 to Google to get them to stop surveilling you.
You can, at least for Youtube - the premium offering is ad-free. In fact, that's the only reason I subscribe - not the content - because my entire family uses my account or is part of my Google "family" to bypass YT ads. Worth the (ever increasing) monthly fee.
My guess is that this only exists to foil Netflix, and if Netflix didn't have an ad-free service, Google would make this option cost a lot more or remove it entirely.
Assuming that's a good faith question (I'm skeptical), let's click through some random HN headlines and use uMatrix to count how many requests for Javascript and other garbage are being made to Google servers, and how many are made to Brave's servers.
Which uses google-analytics, but nothing from Brave.
Practically every commercial website on the internet has Google spyware tied in somehow. And just to spell it out, every time your browser sends a request to one of the Google servers, they're keeping track and surveiling you.
Google has the data on most credit card transactions in the US. Transactions that do not go through Google at all. They are tracking the crap out of you everywhere
> You can, at least for Youtube - the premium offering is ad-free
No, it's free of YT ads but countless creators embed ads in their videos, sometimes of pretty shady businesses (see recent Established Titles controversy).
The only way to get rid of all YouTube ads doesn't cost anything (uBlock + Sponsorblock). And if I pay for content I prefer to do it via Patreon, because why would I reward YouTube for constantly acting against the interests of users and content creators?
If search engines were considered important enough to be a public utility, one could be funded by taxpayer dollars. Now of course, search results can be heavily politicized, but I suppose the same is true of which books a library decides to carry.
Yeah, I just don't trust the govt to not politicize search, or at the very least, to not use search results to manufacture consent or other nefarious intentions.
NPR comes to mind.
With private companies, at least there's some visage of a separation from state influence although we are seeing the lash back now with Twitter.
Google search has been crippled by ads. Sometimes people just want nice stuff and a search engine that wasn't designed to mislead (https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9768350/google-ads-searc...) and where the amount of money paid doesn't dictate what is easy to find would be a great asset to everybody. No company has risen to give us a powerful search engine that isn't also a cesspool of marketing bullshit so it would be reasonable for people to seek an option that serves the interests of the public.
I suppose if the government felt that ads-supported search engines had such misaligned incentives that it would be net beneficial for society to create one without such incentives, then that might serve as a justification. I don’t actually think this is plausible, just making an analogy with say private fire departments.
No thanks, I'd rather not use money coerced from innocent citizens for making a web search engine. Let's use that money for the smallest possible set of limited services.
> It's not like you can pay $3 to Google to get them to stop surveilling you.
Well sort of. You can pay them for YouTube Premium and watch videos without ads. I might pay for an ad-free Google Search but I have developed an almost reflexive habit of ignoring the ads on Google Search anyway. It's much easier to just look past them in the search results, as opposed to when watching a video where you have no choice.
After all the Brave controversies [0] I'm not sure why anyone uses Brave anymore. They took creators' money while ostensibly "collecting" it for them, and they inserted their own affiliate links when you visited certain sites. It's just shady behavior all around. I mean, when you have your own "Controversies" section on Wikipedia, you know there's something wrong.
Especially with Manifest v3 looming which would kill modern ad blockers, I see no reason not to use Firefox. Sure, Brave and other Chromium browsers might say they'll fork Chromium, but how long will that last, really? It's no joke to maintain a fork.
"Brave's controversies" are not really about Brave.
Brave as a company is not above criticism and should be harshly gone after for their mistakes when they do anything less than perfect with regards to privacy or anything else. I think they've done over 90% of things right, but have screwed up a small portion of the complicated stuff (new browser, new online advertising models, and search ecosystem) they're trying to pull off. And yes, they've made a few errors along the way.
That said, the "Brave controversies" are not actually about Brave's real merits as a company, but are mostly about a long-standing grudge regarding Brendan Eich's political beliefs. A certain crowd will not give Eich an inch to ever succeed and will continuously rip even the most minor and inane issue solely to destroy what he represents.
I'm really sick of people pretending that the "Brave controversies" are actually about Brave as a company and not overwhelmingly about the larger ongoing culture war that's been waged.
> "Brave's controversies" are not really about Brave.
Which of Brave's controversies listed on Wikipedia aren't about Brave because they are about Brendan Eich's political beliefs? I have no idea what his political beliefs are, but while I can accept the possibility that they may put Brave under additional scrutiny the problems people have had with Brave are real.
I think it'd be wrong to dismiss their controversies as being purely the product of a "culture war" even if some people's hate for Brendan might help promote awareness of those same controversies.
I don't care about Eich himself, I view creators as separate from their creations, so I'm surely not who you're talking about. I would rather that people use a non Chromium browser over a Chromium one, and honestly, Chromium itself is less shady than Brave due to the shady behavior I mentioned. I mean, man in the middle attacking your own browser, really?
Every one of those "few errors" involved other people's money, hijacking advertisements, etc. I don't even know what Brendan Eich's political beliefs are, except inasmuch as he decided to build a cryptocurrency scheme into his product, but I won't touch Brave with a ten-foot pole.
Not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes it's just people deciding the thing you like isn't good enough for them.
>A certain crowd will not give Eich an inch to ever succeed and will continuously rip even the most minor and inane issue solely to destroy what he represents.
Oh fuck off. To add on to the comments of others, Many of us _do_ care about his "political beliefs". If you're in the tech industry, you're in one of the most queer industries of all time, and some (and sometimes, many depending on where you are) of your colleagues are likely to be some form of queer.
Just being a supporter of Prop 8 would have been a political belief. Actively donating money to fight for it is hate. Additionally, donating to Ron Paul is just proof of bad taste, but donating to Pat Buchanan, a known homophobic, antisemitic, white supremacist candidate doesn't just make it "oh his political beliefs is that gay people aren't cool, teehee" but veers straight into actual fucking hatred.
So, yes, fuck Brendan Eich as a person, _and_ Brave as a company has done a lot of things that make it truly untrustable.
If you'll excuse the tangent, judging [anything] by intentions is generally impossible. There was a time when Google was an absolutely inspiring company and there whole 'Don't Be Evil' slogan wasn't just an ironic joke. And they kept doing the right thing year after year. Yet within a matter of years from their peak they managed to devolve into a sort of satire, in their extremism, of 'evil corporation.'
There was never any reason to expect this to happen, but it did - and exceptionally rapidly. I absolutely agree with you that there's no telling when Brave will start going the other way and compromise all that they currently stand for. And that's okay. Because if, or probably more accurately when, that day comes - I'll be moving onto whoever the next "Brave" might be.
> Brave is profitable on itself and not dependent on search engines money like Firefox.
Brave is still dependent on Google even more than Firefox, I agree that Mozilla must seeks multiple sources of revenue but if it was easy maintaining your own engine Brave would do it.
Brave, Vivaldi, Edge continue to exist. The only difference being, Brave is now a fork that exists independently and has to do security patches on its own.
2. Google stops funding Mozilla.
With 90% of the revenue gone, Mozilla as we know it would cease to exist as a corporation.
So no, Brave's dependence on Google is not a life and death situation for the whole company.
That is correct. The creator of uBlock Origin, gorhill, made a post about it [0], and uBlock Origin actually works better in Firefox than in other browsers apparently [1].
Correct: they will work about as well as DNS-based adblockers. The "cosmetic blocks" you depend on in uBlock Origin to block same-origin and in-page elements, the things that make Fandom wikis usable, will not work.
I had to check what you meant and turned of uBlock on a Fandom wiki. Ye, well, those popup ads are really distracting. Even pop-up video ads. Following your scrolling around.
It's good to remind oneself about how the internet looks like to most people ...
I'm honestly tired of so much misinformation regarding Brave floating around.
> They took creators' money while ostensibly "collecting" it for them
They did not. In the initial days, they did not have the feature to block unregistered creators from getting donations. When Brave was informed about it, they made sure that creators who registered can claim their tipped tokens and for the rest, they refunded the tokens to users.
The fact that you think they'd want their tokens back, when they themselves give them away to Brave Rewards users every month is kinda weird. Not only did they refund the tokens but also got them to the registered creators.
> and they inserted their own affiliate links when you visited certain sites
They had a URL auto-complete bug in the system and it was an opt-in feature but the bug replaced the whole URL instead of suggesting links. They fixed it in a day, before the news even got out. The PR is there on GitHub but people love to bash them because of a bug that happened when Brave wasn't even 6 months old at that point (iirc).
> I mean, when you have your own "Controversies" section on Wikipedia, you know there's something wrong.
So does Mozilla, your point?
> Sure, Brave and other Chromium browsers might say they'll fork Chromium, but how long will that last, really? It's no joke to maintain a fork.
Brave does not depend of manifest v3 for adblocking. Their Ad blocker written in rust is much low level than Ublock. They'll just be fine.
> I see no reason not to use Firefox.
but I do see reasons to not use Firefox. How about performance? Memory management? Loading speed? Dev tools? Webkit?
I have not had any performance issues with Firefox and while I have not used Brave much Chrome has always been a memory hog. Maybe Brave solved that but......
Not really an answer to your question but I have my password manager integrated with my email host and can generate a new masked email with one click when creating new accounts. Not sure how it is as far as privacy (Bitwarden can't read my email, only create new masked emails - the option to allow read access is provided however) but as far as being able to disable problematic addresses on a whim without changing my main is pretty great.
I don’t but honestly I don’t search for things often that I need anonymity, I use kagi more because it seems better than the other search engines at getting the results I care about at the top and not a huge amount of ads or junk posts at the top. They claim to keep the searches as anonymous as possible, and they have been through an audit so hopefully true.
I am not the OP but I did not just out of convenience. If I really wanted to search for something I was extra paranoid about I probably would be taking more precautions anyway.
So, let me get this straight. They will block ads on the internet, only to replace them by their own ads? So the money will go to them instead of the creators of the content you're watching?
They have a browser with a normal adblocking function.
They serve ads themselves, and use these to fund services like Brave News, Brave Talk and Brave Search.
They have an option for the browser to use the OS's toaster popup system to show you ads at predetermined intervals. If you sign up for this, Brave will use a part of their ad revenue to buy BAT from the open market and give it to users who watched these toaster popups.
They have a tipping service where content creators, commenters on eg. Twitter and websites can be tipped with BAT. The people who got tips now have stuff Brave regularly buys from the open market with their ad revenues.
So they serve ads on their own services same as anyone else, they just build them to be privacy respecting. The tipping service + toaster popups combo is intended to replace some of the lost revenue from adblockers like Brave Shields and uBO nuking most ads since most ads are tracking driven. But ads on websites are never replaced, just blocked the same way uBO blocks them, with the same filter lists.
The "other" search engine (you mean Google with Google maps/shopping recommendations etc. right?) didn't buy ads in its own system competing on a level playing field with competitors, but created new space for its own products that was inaccessible to any competitors.
In other words, Brave seems to be doing the right thing here by promoting its own products in the same way that any competing product can.
Don't assume good intentions when malice is equally likely... at least in this technology world we live in. Companies that are actually on the user's side are very rare, so you're more likely to be correct (and safe) by never giving tech companies the benefit of the doubt.
During this beta phase, Brave Search users will see text-based ads in search results. However, during the beta period, Brave users who have opted-in to Brave Private Ads and are using the latest version of Brave will not see Search ads, since these new ad units are not yet eligible for BAT earnings. We’re actively working to integrate Brave Rewards with Brave Search, and hope to make Search ads eligible for BAT earnings in the coming months.
Ads seem to be a modern virus that infects everything. Everyone who claims "no ads", eventually turns their back on that once they get big enough, even companies with more than enough money from their own products (e.g. Apple, Netflix). I've never seen anything so powerful. I guess it comes down to "no business would say no to free money", but it really is incredible.
The market eventually became saturated with products and services; today there are a lot more of them than pockets that can or will purchase them, therefore they fight to occupy the spots where people can notice them first, knowing that whoever comes after won't sell. This is a train wreck waiting to happen since there are no signs that it could self-limit in the immediate future; products and services sellers will eventually fight for every possible still free space to put ads into and win potential users attention; it will simply become worse and worse, unless someone invents consumerism with some limits built in, which in today's culture is deeply frowned upon.
That's not the problem. The problem is they sold their service as one thing, and then completely switch on the users down the line, instead of being honest upfront.
It was free, so they never sold it and nobody ever bought it. Companies often times need to pivot or introduce pricing to their products to survive. Would rather pay a modest fee to ensure that Brave continues as an alternative to the major browsers vs them running out of money and shutting down.
>It was free, so they never sold it and nobody ever bought it.
I mean, OP's not wrong. The phrase doesn't have to specifically mean an exchange of goods for money - can sell you on an idea, for instance. They "sold you" on the idea of using Brave by being very anti-ad. Now that you "bought it" and are hooked, they'd like some money.
Modern? When I grew up in the ’90s, ads were everywhere: in the magazines I was reading, on TV, on billboards, in the mail. How can you call ads a modern virus?
Ads aren't a new thing, but the it's been allowed to spread unchecked and unregulated in ways that were simply not possible in the 90s causing new problems.
I felt this way for a while, but I’d like to offer another angle: maybe it’s like saying “Every company eventually hires tall people. Some have no tall people, but it’s just a matter of time. Tall people are really an unstoppable force.” The missing piece is also observing short people (ad-free offerings), which you’d notice are not being eliminated, are also prevalent, and also “infect” everything. I think the unstoppable force being felt here is just statistics: ads are often an option, companies make a lot of decisions, it’s statistically inevitable that some of those will be ads, unless the company has some strong aversion to ads, which most don’t.
>Ads seem to be a modern virus that infects everything. Everyone who claims "no ads", eventually turns their back on that once they get big enough, even companies with more than enough money from their own products (e.g. Apple, Netflix).
TBF at least it's better than the status quo of the late 90's to early 2000s, when the revenue model was malware and actual viruses rather than ad supported.
> TBF at least it's better than the status quo of the late 90's to early 2000s, when the revenue model was malware and actual viruses rather than ad supported.
Back then we called software that phoned home to check for updates spyware and it was to be avoided. The very idea that a random offline program on my system would know when I was connected to the internet, and would be collecting my IP address was unacceptable. Now it's standard practice.
The revenue model back then was shareware. You get the software, it mostly works, and you send a check to some PO box to get a full version. It wasn't terrible. I don't remember too many companies outright shipping malware and when they did people were rightly pissed off (Sony's rootkit, or BonziBuddy for example)
What we had were lots of ad filled websites hosting shareware and it was often the ads that were infecting people, although some sites did inject malware into the downloads.
But you need money. Without money, whole businesses is pointless. With financial crisis and ridiculous inflation, who cares about ads?
Well... If they try sell you a product, it is harmless. But with selling an ideas and manipulation of masses, that is diferent story. I guess propaganda is a right definition.
Companies throw a lot of money at ads. Far more than individual consumers can muster. It's the difference between grass-roots donations and institutional funding.
They could have meant when Brave swapped affiliate links before the backlash had them backtrack. Which was a wild thing to do. Blocking ads in your browser while charging to not show ads is also pretty wild. Why doesn’t their ad blocker block their ads?
They didn't replace affiliate links. They had a feature similar to Firefox Suggest or whatever's in Chrome/Edge nowadays I think. They had a deal with eg. Binance, and if you typed Binance in the address bar, their Binance promo would show up as one of the results.
They had a bug in it where if you typed a valid URL (eg. binance.us) it'd still give the sponsored link as an autocomplete which it shouldn't have. That bug stood for one day, if memory serves, and the feature was turned off by default.
Oh wow. So much time had passed since that. I remember seeing the details after I had made the negative connection between Brave and “refgate”. Especially the HN thread at the time was chaotic. That negative connotation never left.
I doubt that. They said replace ads, not add affiliates, those are different words entirely. The "ad replacing" is a common lie.
Just don't use Brave search, the separate product. Or you know, add the blocking rules yourself to the ad blocker, that works. Or you know, pay the $3 dollars to support the thing you use.
Most of the people complaining here don't actually care about this. This is all just a proxy war to go against Eich for his beliefs. It happens every Brave thread, pretty transparent and pathetic.
Replacement doesn't imply a reuse of a specific location. Taking an ad out your browser and placing a different ad on your desktop is still replacement. Do you really not understand that advertising isn't about space in physical world, but about space in your mind? What brave does is absolutely replacement. They replace a bit of light that was emanating from one part of your device's screen to invade your attention to make some other party money with a bit of light that emanates from a different part of your device's screen to invade your attention to make them money. How in the world is that not "replacement"?
1. take the place of.
"Ian's smile was replaced by a frown"
2. put (something) back in a previous place or position.
"he drained his glass and replaced it on the bar"
Notice the use of place and position. If you say we "replace ads", I think you are misusing the word replace. I hope you won't from here on, because we definitely still get smeared with the lie that we replace ads in-situ in publisher pages.
I’m not asking how you think the creators feel about ads. Did Brave as a company ever say that their product would be free of ads? If so, what was their plan for not going out of business?
lots of criticism for brave in this thread. they are the best privacy browser at the moment based on leakage tests for default settings. they got a working add-blocker by default. they have privacy preserving ads because of local in browser matching, your data never leaves the browser for the ads, the ads come to you! they even pay you for watching the ads, and enable you to support creators.
I feel we finally have a privacy respecting browser normal people and tech enthousiast can use, and it puzzles me how it's painted here. let's stay objective
if you don't like the web3 stuff or the blockchain based rewards don't use it. But the web3 space is booming and brave has been nice way to interact with it.
lots of projects, and interest has boomed last year because there has been lots of money sloshing around. but it's very much the wild west. just look for cool tech and not for get rich quick schemes and your bound to find something to your liking!
I think Brave Ads is sophomoric to say that they don't track users when Apple, not to mention Facebook and Google, understand that the effective operation of Internet advertising is to track users.
Blocking other companies' ads and posting their own ads instead is unbecoming and also reminds me of AdBlock Plus.
Kagi is excellent, and it's the only monthly subscription where I actually feel like I'm getting something of value.
Even my Pandora subscription feels like I'm getting ripped off since I really only ever listen to the same songs anyways, and the app is a dumpster fire. Netflix/Disney+/Hulu/etc also suck since they just feel like I'm wasting money due to feuds between companies that having nothing to do with me. I have a Proton Mail subscription, and it's okay, but extremely overpriced for what I'm getting, while a cheaper mail service would potentially get my emails blocked from the big service providers because they think I'm a spammer. There are also apps that are requiring me to pay a monthly sub while offering nothing in return for it just because they can. My workout tracker app for example is exactly the same janky mess it was ~2 years ago, yet I've been paying $4/mo for it!
..but Kagi? It works great, it works reliably, and it works for me.
I'll add to this, it's completely replaced my work search, and I haven't fallen back to a google search in months, even for very arcane Linux kernel internals. You can even manually prioritize certain sites, giving you a way to have a hand in building your own search experience.
They seem really cool. But, I was reading the FAQ, and they claim it costs about $1 to process 80 searches. That seems extremely high. I would have expected that the up-front cost of creating and storing indexes is very expensive, but the cost of user searches to be so low that they're nearly negligible. Okay, it sounds like they lose money with each new added user
They are using google custom search and Bing search apis. They cost about ~$5 per 1000 queries - so thats 40c on the dollar already for those 80 queries. Thats just for a single "behind the scenes" query - and they sometimes perform multiple subqueries based on your "lens" configuration which inflates the cost further.
They also have their own infra and team to support.
I wouldnt call myself a search engine poweruser, but based on my usage, they are definitely losing money on those subscriptions.
API's that charge by usage usually have terms that prevent caching API results. This also applies to Bing:
> 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. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal)
It's really unfortunate Microsoft doesn't provide a free API that require users to display ads, or at the very least make their ad network accessible to all.
No way to test it by yourself - you can try the provided examples; it relies on others indexes and mentions in documentation "You can think of Kagi as a "search client"". It requires an account in the first place and I can't see a word about pricing.
I've been testing Brave search for some time now (switched from DDG after 2y) and I have to say that I'm very impressed with the quality of results to the degree that I'm wondering if they are simply scraping Google.
What's the idea here? I was under the impression that one of the selling points of Brave is that you don't get ads when browsing. Doesn't this go against that?
It's Freemium, you pay $3/month for no ads, or you get ad-supported search _that is privacy focussed_ for free. They're running their own index, it costs money.
The question is whether this is better than Google's offering ... to me it sounds like it is so long as the results stand up to scrutiny.
Brave's USP always seems to have been meaning the web work practically without profiteering and maintaining a strong user privacy focus. It always seems to have had payment for content as a part of their model, and so payment for search seems to fit well in that framework.
I admit it does seems to be a climb down for those who see Brave as "free + no-ads".
Brave's key selling point was that it respects privacy, and it blocked ads because web advertising is usually antithetical to privacy.
I imagine their idea here is that "ads aren't bad if they respect privacy/don't weaken security", but I'm thinking most Brave users are going to disagree.
hard to see how that meaningfully differentiates them from everyone else given that this is what all the ad platforms seem to be moving towards with topic/cohort based ads and third party cookies on the way out.
Brave's been blocking third-party cookies from the beginning; Firefox and Safari followed in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Third party cookies might not have been on the way out if Brave hadn't taken that first step already.
I guess they have failed in marketing the differentiation then (if there is one). I was just clarifying the product in question, never promised an ad free product.
This reply appears to be both a strawman (I never said anything about my preferences) and an ad hominem attack (Diminishing my comment bc of who I am).
There are three ways you can gets for goods and services in this world
i) Pay Money (HNers who claim, i'll-pay-for-no-ads-services are pathetic liars as seen from the adoption rate of YouTube premium which offers exactly that service).
ii) Pay through watching Ads
a) Watch relevant but low volume targeted ads (allow tracking)
or
b) Watch irrelevant but higher volume ads (no tracking -- pihole)
iii) Steal Content
Most HNers who complain have made their choices very vocal. They prefer (ii)b and yet they make sad pikachu face when they are bombarded with Ads.
When Ads aren't effective (not targeted), it's compensated by higher volume. It's, Economics/Math 101.
I don't prefer to be bombarded with ads. But a lot of the bad in ads is tracking and being insanely intrusive visually, not that they exist in the first place.
Everything free, becomes ad-infested. Nothing is free, and it's really annoying seeing company after company make empty promises about privacy and "being different", then switching up when their investors start breathing down their necks. Just be honest from the start.
Yeah, they're so ubiquitous people have gotten used to them. Companies have learned that if you put ads in paid products, people grumble and moan but still keep paying for your product.
The future is ads everywhere, paid or free, doesn't matter. More revenue out of every user with little effort, shareholders love this stuff.
Agreed. Outside software, there's a growing plague as well.
- Buying an $1200+ iPhone that doesn't come with an adapter.
- BMW charging you $10+ bucks per month to turn on seat heaters that came with your already expensive car
- Mercedes 0-60mph acceleration booster "unlock fee" for $1200/year
- Tesla woes with frequent "upgrades" locked behind paywalls.
- The ironic micro-transactions in Mobile games. When summed up, they are only "macro" with millions of bucks coming in every day. This has infested gaming outside Mobile as well. I'm not ever gonna touch console gaming again.
Their secret is they did not try to grow at an insane rate. They have 50 employees and over $650 million in revenue. The revenue per employee is over $13 million.
The reason the giants are giant is because they are driven to become giant by people and investors who want to become billionaires.
I dunno if it's fair to say "just be honest from the start" -- they might have genuinely believed it but had to face the reality because they set themselves up poorly with how they raised / their finances / etc.
It blocks almost all ads. It has a simple button to turn ad blocking off when I need to use websites that don't work with ad blockers. I don't need to fiddle with an extension.
I can use it on android without effort.
This is about brave search, which I have never used.
I don't use the brave homepage, so I never saw the homepage ads that folks complained about.
HN seems to hate Brave for some reason. But it has worked perfectly for years. I don't care if it's perfect privacy -- not sure I ever felt Brave promised that.
I have never heard of the browsers you mention. I tried to use Chromium for a while, but you have to find distributions that include basic features and it was a hassle. Not a big hassle, but made me stick with Brave.
I think some if the hate comes from people who would like to see more variety in the browser market. At the moment we're heading to a single dominant force of chromium based browsers. And history has shown what happens when an entity holds all the cards and there is less choice.
I like the product, plain and simple. Chromium has better security on mobile, and I like tab groups. Sync is also nice, and Brave's is e2ee. What's not to like?
Brave Shields won't care about Manifest v3 even the tiniest bit. The shields are not a browser extension so extension APIs don't have any bearing on their functionality.
Correct me if I am wrong, but can't we just remove all Firefox telemetry by unchecking these options in Privacy & Security:
1) Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
2) Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations
3) Allow Firefox to install and run studies
4) Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf
I understand they're selected by default so they're collecting data on many unaware users, but for anyone on HN, I am confident they have probably deselected all of them.
Possibly a completely dumb idea, but I’ve wondered for a while if there would be value in building an open data web index, something which would allow competing providers to offer different search algorithms on top of.
I don’t know enough about the technical details about building a search engine, so perhaps this isn’t feasible because the algorithm and the index need to be tightly coupled to each other, but my hunch is that it would be beneficial for the web if there were an open street map of search indexes.
I am a user of brave search actually, I’m glad you guys released the product!
Really more than anything else, I think about how important search is to the open web/maintaining a healthy internet. And by that, I mean that I don’t think having one dominant search provider is a good thing.
There are a lot of small upstarts that I’m happy to use such as brave/ddg/etc, but given the fact that many of those use bing as a backend I am left wondering how viable they’ll be in unseating google/bing (I know brave maintains its own index, which is a big plus).
Would you trust Google's ( or other search provider's) ads more, if they had a separately browsable "classifieds" site, not unlike Craigslist, that the search ads would be search results from (reach modified by how much the ads were paid with, ofc.). Anyway, when you saw an add, you could click through it like now, or click to browse a relevant section of the classifieds site. Which would also work as a catalog of all paid and also unpaid ads the search provider carried?
I'm not a fan of ads at all. But I am curious, is there an alternative way to provide a free service while still making money?
Unrelated, it would be cool to be able to self host an actual search engine (not talking about privacy-focused front ends like Searx -- but I'm grateful for projects like it) without having to store petabytes of data. Is there a self-hostable search engine alternative that doesn't just use another backend search engine service like Bing?
Actually Useful(tm) result out of the recent influx of AI hype -- "search engine" trained on, by and large, how people recommend links on sites like Reddit. It's a little hit or miss in my experience still, but when it hits it's legitimately brilliant, and mostly avoids the "Google search results are useless and dominated by SEO-farm garbage" issue.
HN could do a better title, it seems almost like it's clickbait. The original article title is "Brave debuts privacy-preserving ads in its search engine" - so the HN title kind of implies the opposite.
I think paying for content / services is the only way out of.. this. This thing we're in where Advertiser is King. This ecosystem that breeds dark patterns and skews all discourse towards the uninformed and adversarial.
What would be a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title?
The article's title sounds too pressreleasey to me, which is a form of misleading+linkbait in its own right, so it was a legit title to rewrite, given HN's rule ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
the Brave browser could have been Chromium with uBlock Origin pre-packaged with it. That's it. That's all it ever needed to be.
Looking around the codebase, it's filled with eyebrow-raising things like direct integration with specific crypto exchanges. Heck, it still has a whole automatic affiliate fraud feature present in the code, but disabled by default.
The truth is, the mission statement is not commercially viable, because it was always trivially achievable as a non-profit project.
Generally I've found brave's results to be better on a wide swath of topics. Long form, (mostly) well written pages are top of the stack. Image search and video search lags behind other search engines significantly, though.
Huh? So, thoroughly degoogling Chromium, offering standalone e2ee sync services, a standalone search engine, near uBO grade content blocking on mobile, better YouTube experience on mobile, actually user controllable takes on things like a newtab newsfeed, private video calls etc. is bad? Native vertical tabs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135489) is bad?
> A company has to make money to survive and pay its employees.
So why do they give their product away for free? To lure naive/optimistic people in so they can be exploited later? Why should a company like that survive?
If you don't like the ads I'm sure there will be ways to block them. Every search engine has ads, StartPage, DDG, Google, etc... None have an option to pay. I don't see what's wrong with them keeping the lights on, every startup can't burn money forever.
I prefer paying for services, e.g. Tutanota, Anonaddy, Bitwarden, Guardian. Why do people take everything on the web for free? Of course, companies need to make money - if not with subs, then with ads. What else should they do?
A lot of angry comments in here, but the post says there's an ad-free paid version,
> Ads will give users the option to use our independent search engine with ads that don’t track them, or to sign up for ad-free paid search
Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Or do you expect software companies to work for free? (Presumably not the companies you work for).
Glad to see other folks investing in ethical advertising. It's something we've been working on for a long time over at https://ethicalads.io/ -- and it's an important step forward in improving how ads are served. With the advances in ML, we're investing in content-based targeting, which we can do as a display network. But search ads have so much context built in, they don't need to track you.
> A lot of angry comments in here, but the post says there's an ad-free paid version,
People in the comments here who have expectations that products be free, but also not include ads, are a continual problem with the discourse around this stuff. It's quite tiring and repetitive. Brave is even giving you the option to opt out of ads by paying a very reasonable $3/mo. I'm not sure what else you could ask for -- ads that don't surveil you, and the option to pay a reasonable amount to opt out of them.
Ads just like sex are ethical if they're consensual.
If I want to buy a product and want to see what exists, ads can actually be helpful sometimes. I don't want to see them in any other situation, though, and it doesn't ever justify tracking.
Some users — possibly Brave's core target audience — might complain that there's no way to remain anonymous in this flow: either you allow Brave to leak your info to advertisers, or you allow Brave to leak your info to Stripe in the payment flow. There's (currently) no way to pay for a Brave Premium account with crypto or through any other anonymous mechanism.
> either you allow Brave to leak your info to advertisers
Can you expand on this? According to the article the ads are privacy-preserving but I'm open to hearing otherwise. There's not a lot of detail in the article.
Assuming we can trust Brave, the article clearly states: "Brave Search only uses your search query, country, and device type to show you ads, and does not keep any kind of profile of your searches."
My question to somebody who understands this more than me, by collecting query, country, device type, is that enough info to identify users?
Doesn't Brave automatically get User Agent strings, too?
Unless they mean something non-conventional, a search query, country, and device type are not enough to do any fingerprinting reliably. Some would argue that if you live in a very small country (like Vatican City) and you are the only user who searches for some obscure query on a daily basis then that's enough to identify you. But on a global scale of a search engine - no, not enough.
Even if that is enough to identify users, you'd have to show evidence that that information is being handed to advertisers, which is what GP accused them of.
So the ads you see are just based on country, type of device (windows,linux,macos,android or ios), and your search term, which is the minimum you really need for relevance. But these are not kept in any sort of tracking profile and Brave doesn't know anything about you, or queries across sessions. And unlike most of the search engines out there right now, we are motivated to ensure that the ads do not become a mess that buries organic results.
Is there any amount for which you would’ve instantly signed up and started paying or would even $1 a month still be something you “might give a try” (read: won’t do in a million years)?
I won't pay for anything if that doesn't provide me decent search results. This is where the "might give a try" comes from and I would definitely try the version with ads first because I would hate creating an account and giving my card number to another service if I am not 100% sure I am interested. I would also want to know if I need to pay that amont per user in my household or if I would need as many accounts per family member so that the quality of our search results aren't harmed by the difference in interests/history.
3$/month seems decent to me if search results are improved over google. The 10$/month that kagi ask me for are a bit harder to swallow. Not in itself but additionned to all the other 10ish bucks services I am already subscribed to (streaming, backup, etc). There is simply a limit/month I am willing to spend on the whole package and if I spend say n$/month on a search engine per user I will unsubscribe to other services of the same cost. And this is something I may have to negociate with my partner.
The good thing is it is easier to move from and to a paying search engine than say, an instant messaging service.
Jesus Christ. First it was $3/month seems like a decent price that you might try if you weren’t already running an ad blocker. Then it’s there’s no price cheap enough if it’s not decent search results. Then it’s well I need to know how many people per account and then it’s I’d have to talk it over with my partners.
You can just say there’s a 0% chance you’d pay $1 a month and that you’d always have an excuse for why this option isn’t good enough for your high standards.
At $1 it would be a no-brainer for me, but one possible argument I can see is that a flat fee is a funny arrangement here - I pay $3/mo if I make 100 searches a day, or 1, or none. If the idea is that it would only be fair to Brave to pay them for what they aren't making by showing me ads, you might think it would make more sense to have me pay for exactly how much they lose, not less or more?
> you might think it would make more sense to have me pay for exactly how much they lose, not less or more
You might think that, yes.
Why is the flat fee “funny”? Netflix, Spotify, NYT, etc. all charge the flat fee. In fact I’m having a hard time thinking of any non-flat-fee consumer digital products.
Well in broad terms those also are getting paid up front or making you watch / listen to ads instead, sure. In the case of SEM, the industry puts kind of a lot of energy into tracking ads, so it seems a little more straightforward to know how much I'm worth to them. But in more general terms, if we ever manage to sort out micropayments, I would prefer to pay as I go for everything - imagine the flat rate subscription model for say, your energy or water bill: "we're charging about what most families would use in a month; you say you're not a family of four? too bad."
I find the wild, anti-competitive cross product "synergy" the big tech companies are employing just as concerning as privacy violations.
(E.g. Google search pushing Chrome and other services, Chrome sync logging users into YouTube, Android, Windows pushing One Drive, Apple music not paying the Apple store tax, Facebook harvesting WhatsApp data etc.)
Brave joining those practices leaves an ugly taste.
I asked the same thing to Luke Mulks (VP of Business at Brave) about an year ago when search got out of Beta and he "promised" that the behavior from the built-in ad blocker would be the same as it is any other page. IOW, the ad blocker does not block first-party ads unless you set the browser to "aggressively block ads and trackers".
Is anyone surprised? Brave was trying to push their own ad network years ago with the BAT (Brave Attention Token) to "pay" websites for eyes on their page. And guess how they paid for it? By running their own ads over native web content.
Probably because Brave doesn't run their own ads over native web content. Brave Rewards ads are opt-in things delivered as native OS toaster popups and unrelated to your browsing activity.
> 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."