Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results
- Reference: 1691078409
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/08/03/brave_cuts_ties_with_bing/
- Source link:
On Thursday, the company said that image and video results from Brave Search – available on the web at search.brave.com and via its browser – will be served from Brave's own index.
Search indexes are made by visiting online resources – typically web pages, images, videos, or other files – with a crawler bot and recording the locations of these resources in a database. And when an internet user submits a query to a search engine, the search engine checks its index (and possible other sources) to find the addresses of resources that correspond to the query keywords. There's actually a lot more to it but that's the basic idea.
[1]
Ranking matches from the list in such a way that the search user sees results ordered by predicted relevance is an ongoing computer science challenge, one that Google handled effectively for years with the help of its PageRank algorithm and other machinations. And it continues to dominate the US search market, with more than 90 percent market share in June, [2]according to Similarweb .
[3]
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But in recent years, there has been growing sentiment that Google Search [5]is [6]getting [7]worse . Part of the problem is AI content generation, which is being used to create [8]web spam , to the detriment of web users. Yet AI is also part of the supposed solution, at least for rival Microsoft, which sees OpenAI's chatbot tech as a way to rewrite the expectations for web search at Google's expense.
Google has made matters worse for itself by trying to reinvent targeted advertising at a time when proliferating privacy rules and antitrust regulatory entanglements limit its options.
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Brave now aims to ride the wave of discontent with "Big Tech" by highlighting its commitment to privacy and independence – small tech.
"Brave Search is 100 percent private and anonymous, which sets a high bar for image/video search to meet," the company said in a blog post provided to The Register . "Whether it’s a matter of personal safety or personal preference, users should be able to discover content without their search engine reporting and profiling those results to a Big Tech company."
The Brave browser currently has about [10]57.76 million monthly active users . Mozilla Firefox, as a point of comparison, has about [11]187 million monthly active users .
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Brave Search [13]debuted in 2021 , offering text-based search results from an independent index. A service called [14]Goggles that allows personal search result filtering followed in 2022. And Brave launched [15]an API for its search service earlier this year.
By shifting to its own index for images and videos, Brave further differentiates its search offering from companies that essentially repackage Google and Bing. For example, DuckDuckGo relies [16]mostly on Bing .
[17]Brave sorry about coding snafu that sent search queries to affiliate links, insists practice is 'industry standard'
[18]Brave Search leaves beta, offers Goggles for filtering, personalizing results
[19]Brave roasts DuckDuckGo over Bing privacy exception
[20]Brave takes the spring out of creepy bounce tracking
There are not many active public web search indexes: Google, Bing, and Brave in the US; Baidu, Huawei (Petal), and Tencent (Sogou), among others, in China; Yandex in Russia; and Mojeek in the UK.
Brave argues that having its own index frees the company from content decisions made by others. As an example, the browser biz points to an incident two years ago when Bing briefly [21]stopped serving search results for the Tiananmen Square "tank man," an inquiry that remains unwelcome in China. Brave Search also couldn't find "tank man" at the time because the service sourced its image results from Microsoft Bing.
No longer. However, Brave says it is committed to making it easy to conduct searches using other search engines for queries that Brave Search cannot answer. For Brave Search on the web, that means those making inquiries have the option to send their keywords to other search services – via links shown below the top 10 results – if Brave's index proves disappointing.
"Brave is on a mission to build a user-first Web," the company said in its blog post. "That mission starts with the Brave browser and Brave Search. With the release of image and video search, we’re continuing to innovate within the search industry, providing viable and preferable products for users who want choice and transparency in their search for information online." ®
Get our [22]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZMwjhjrihatoY9uoqYWS-QAAAs4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://www.similarweb.com/engines/united-states/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMwjhjrihatoY9uoqYWS-QAAAs4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMwjhjrihatoY9uoqYWS-QAAAs4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.thestar.com/business/google-search-has-gotten-worse-here-s-the-trick-people-have-found-to-get-around/article_5d51869b-6be0-5de7-ae12-18e9b93f8323.html
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-search-results-monopoly/
[7] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/
[8] https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/05/ai-generated-content-farms-fill-search-results-with-advert-stuffed-spam
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMwjhjrihatoY9uoqYWS-QAAAs4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://brave.com/transparency/
[11] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMwjhjrihatoY9uoqYWS-QAAAs4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/22/brave_search_engine/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/brave_search_googles_google/
[15] https://brave.com/search-api-launch/
[16] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/09/brave_affiliate_links_bug/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/brave_search_googles_google/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/17/brave_duckduckgo/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/09/brave_bounce_tracking/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/04/search_engine_tiananmen/
[22] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
A pity about …
If it wasn't for Brave's "Basic Attention Token" payment for your eyes on their ads, I'd be a convert. But it's crypto-based, and my snake is not in need of oiling.
Other solutions.
You could bounce your search query off third party web page code, as long as you return the favour, creating an anonymising network. It would work for search queries just as it would work as a crowd VPN service. You could scrape/filter Google search results, allowing users to avoid specific results. This would be particularly useful as Google now ignores half of what you type it and sends you popular/trending crap instead of what you want. You can also implement stuff like persistent search and distributed search, allowing users to create their own links by order of usefulness for any search terms. This would effectively remove the issue of censorship of search. You could also allow endless results (as Google originally did), rather than the 3 or 4 pages it now limits you to. Lots of cool new stuff to do. Would be nice is someone actually did it.
Re: Other solutions.
You could do that, but you would still be dependent on Google search content, which is part of what Brave is trying to avoid.
Re: Other solutions.
Exactly
cf Amazon, which offers you what they want to sell , not what you want to buy
Brave search, not great yet
I use Brave everyday, but there are issues with search, and I often use google on Firefox to find what Brave Search fails to find for me. One fly in the ointment is that I live in a town in the US with the same name as a large Canadian city, even adding the state name to the search string doesn't help, Brave shows me shops for that city in Canada.
Google search
“… Google Search is getting worse. Part of the problem is AI content generation,….”
I don’t buy this at all. Google search was good back in the day. But it’s been gradually getting worse for a long time and has been rubbish for years now; long before “AI” became a thing.
I think the reason for this is that they are no longer interested in actually providing useful search results any more, and haven’t been for ages. They are only interested in serving up whatever it is they need to serve up to make money out of you, which is why the first 20 results of any search point to Youtube and Amazon (presumably because Amazon pay Google boat-loads of cash), with the remainder pointing to stack overflow. If Google happens to provide a useful search result these days, it’s purely by accident
Do no evil. Well, isn't that a Brave sentiment?
> Part of the problem is AI content generation, which is being used to create web spam, to the detriment of web users.
This article doesn’t make sense in the context the above quote. Brave is literally selling copyright data for AI purposes (there was a HN story some weeks ago) and contributing to the problem, whether you scrape for direct rephrasing or for training a model.
Why don’t you unearth that worm and then tell us whether or not Brave has a future in the search space.
And it won’t be long before Google cuts their legs off by isolating Chromium because of Google’s monetary interests. I can hear the excuses rolling down the hill already.
If Brave was serious about their privacy features then why are they saying one thing to your face and doing something completely different behind the curtain?
Great news! I already use Brave Search and it's very good, a built-in image search was the one thing missing. (And maybe Maps integration too.)