News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of ex-Cliqz devs and tech.

Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by Zhyl on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @09:59AM (#26329162)
For those who missed it, Cliqz did a very in-depth series of blog posts on their tech [0]. Basically, it was "word2vec: The Search Engine".

It was actually very impressive in terms of semantic understanding, but the index was pretty awful. I either got exactly what I was looking for, or no hits at all. I can imagine that they'd get massive value by focusing on more information-rich natural language sources and de-prioritising images or structured/knowledge queries for the time being. Some good partnerships to provide instant answers a-la Duckduckgo's goodies would be excellent.

I also can't express how much better the Brave brand will be for them - even 'Tailcat' is a much better name. Cliqz sounds too much like an off-brand, gutter ad seller to ever have credibility, and I say that as someone who was fairly impressed with their tech.

I am worried that they're currently pitching this as a general purpose search engine at the moment when it will be a while before it can even pretend to compete with Google. I would advise for them to find a niche where they can whip Google into next week, and then expand on scope from there.

[0] https://www.0x65.dev/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by jarcane on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:04AM (#26329227)
"Cliqz sounds too much like an off-brand, gutter ad seller to ever have credibility, and I say that as someone who was fairly impressed with their tech."

That's because they were. The parent company was in adtech and they even had another subsidiary that was hawking browser toolbars.

Frankly though, the Brave brand has no better reputation with me however, so it still means seeing whatever promise the tech might've had consigned to the same headspace as the rest of the scamweb.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by caslon on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:26AM (#26330579)
The Brave brand is nearly worthless. I'm not sure how to feel about that. They're releasing their new search engine as free software, which is nice, but their long history of messing even the simplest of things up still leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I wonder if they'll ever work themselves out of the "le shill lion" moniker. Probably not. Though with this new search engine attempt, they might finally give up on cryptocurrency, which would be nice.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by carbotaniuman on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:32AM (#26330678)
Brave's cryptocurrency is the only reason millions of people use it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by ac29 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @05:11PM (#26335424)
Perhaps, but for many others a business model of "___, but with crypto!" is a huge turn off.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by themolecularman on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:39AM (#26330793)
> Frankly though, the Brave brand has no better reputation with me however, so it still means seeing whatever promise the tech might've had consigned to the same headspace as the rest of the scamweb.

Can I ask why? I've been de-googling my life and recently switched from Chrome to Brave.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by terhechte on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @12:53PM (#26331979)
I think it is because they're also behind BAT which is a cryptocurrency.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by api on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:39AM (#26329748)
> hawking browser toolbars.

Ahh yes, the lowest circle of adtech hell. I didn't know that kind of annoyware was even still a thing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by zenexer on Thursday March 04, 2021 @12:07AM (#26338868)
It’s evolved into an even worse beast: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/is-your-browser-extensio...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brave is launching its own search engine with the help of... by abhinavsharma on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @01:06PM (#26332198)
I think the most interesting idea here is that of Goggles, filters like

- trusted product reviews - left biased media/right biased media - my cooking sites.

This is something we've been doing for a while in Insight (YC W19) (https://insightbrowser.com/) and our users really like creating and sharing them. They work on top of Google, DDG or whatever your search engine is. We suggest useful filters as well.

It's cool to see that idea proliferate — it could be a part of every search/browsing experience soon. All modern search engines try and guess intent that that's an increasingly difficult guess to get right.

[ Parent | on HN ]