The affiliate link autocomplete for finance.{us, com} was a bug and fixed immediately.
Browsers other than Brave have a hard time surviving without being captured by a search or other big-tech power. We're the only user-first, private browser with opt-in revenue sharing.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3292619/the-brave-brow...
These seem pretty cut-and-dry, but if they are false they should definitely retract.
> We're the only user-first, private browser with opt-in revenue sharing.
I personally don't want revenue sharing - I just want the first browser that is user-first and private. The issue with me being advertised to isnt that I want a cut of the revenue, it's that I don't want to be advertised to. That's the whole point of my post - if you need revenue just charge me for it. Why can't we just have a search company that will just let me pay them money in a straightforward 1950's-style transaction.
All I'm saying is - Please don't try to beat Google Search at being Google Search with the same ads-in-search model - you have such a great opportunity, and clearly the experience, to do something different! I personally hope you choose a different path that allows you to have a better ad-free product. Maybe you will succeed going down the ad-route, but I personally want a different option to having my results stuffed with ads, rather than just a new (either better or worse) Google.
As soon as you do a paid version of search I'll be a subscriber, as long as there is a guarantee that it is privacy-preserving, will never have ads, is a sensible price and isn't linked to some weird crypto stuff.
For companies - It doesn't sound too hard to implement and seems like it would be a good source of revenue. Plus paying subscribers will be more 'loyal' in terms of moving their searches across.
For users - you get more of a guarantee that the companies statements about privacy and impartiality are true, because there is less incentive for them to break that.
I would love a company like DuckDuckGo or Brave to offer a paid tier where I can just subscribe to an ad-free search engine (I would love Google to offer a 'Google Premium' with this, but let's be real that's not happening!).
i.e. If you are competing with Google by releasing a free search engine with Ads, you have to provide better search results with Ads mixed in than Google which will be tough. If you found a monetisation strategy that didn't involve Ads, theoretically it should be easier to offer a better quality search result and better quality product than Google (because you are actually focussing on delivering the best quality results rather than the right mix of good-results and Ads to optimise revenue).