pythux

Compared to, e.g. France, this week’s Bavaria looked refreshingly green. Not saying it’s great but it didn’t feel too dry (maybe it depends where specifically?). I didn’t know about the farmers’ struggles, though.

Brave Search operates a fully independent index (i.e. we have zero reliance on Bing or any other third-party index).

Disclaimer: I work at Brave

Didn't all other countries get used to the 10% extra tariffs currently applied, though? It's pretty clear that 100% is a threat, but the previous threats didn't end up with 0% so it "worked".

It might not be a coincidence that POTUS wrote yesterday on Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed on any country proceeding with taxing US' digital services.

Thank you for explaining the issue with such clarity. This is one of the best comments I’ve read for a while.

They link to: https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-omni-68d100a86... from the blog post but it does seem like this redirects to their main space on HF so maybe they didn't yet make the model public?

Hey, thanks for the kind words. I just wanted to clarify that Brave Search is 100% independent and doesn’t source results from any third -party (see here for more details: https://brave.com/blog/search-independence/)

Disclaimer: I work at Brave

Kagi is not independent: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Disclaimer: I work at Brave.

> If the story turns out like it did with Cliqz/Hubert Burda (the other big German publisher) it will mean reinterpreting privacy as keeping the American companies out of the loop but sharing the data with the German publisher is OK, because they are clearly the good guys and can be trusted to treat your data responsibly.

Your sentence seems to imply that Cliqz was collecting "[the] data" like American companies (which companies? Which data?). Can you clarify what you are referring to?

Disclaimer: I worked at Cliqz

These models are not of the same nature either. Their training was done in a different way. A uniform naming (even with explicit number of parameters) would still be misleading.

Update on the status page as of 16h10 CET:

"Technical difficulties Investigating - We are currently experiencing intermittent network issues affecting some of our users. We are working to fully restore services as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience. Jan 09, 2025 - 16:10 CET"

This seems to impact VPN, Calendar, etc.

I can confirm that both web client and iOS apps cannot connect to servers at this point. There was a server outage earlier today, not sure if it's related.

Hey, let me forward that to someone more knowledgeable about this topic. We'll get back to you. Thanks for the feedback!

It can be both, we have people who look at community feedback on a daily basis, but engineers also tend to be out there on HN and Reddit, etc. and today it was the case that I saw the comment and could jump in straight away.

I just wanted to thank you for sharing your experience in such details. Wishing you all the best on your path to recovery and beyond.

Hi, Brave engineer here,

May I ask when you switched away from Brave Search? We've been doing work to reduce the amount of captchas a few months ago and we stopped getting feedback about this issue at that point. If it's still happening, it's something we will look into again.

Also, are you a user of ProtonVPN by any chance?

Thanks for your help,

That is not fully accurate. Brave Search is fully independent - the last dependency on Bing was dropped more than a year ago, but even at the time the dependency would not have prevented Brave Search from functioning during an event like yesterday’s Bing outage - it would have resulted in a drop of quality on a subset of complicated queries, though.

The “augmentation with Google” that you mention is an optional feature that only works in Brave browser and doesn’t mean Brave Search is less independent than in other browsers (but it might mean that the quality is increased for some queries; or at least closer to Google results in these cases).

I think when talking about independence it is important to make a distinction between “dependent” which means “cannot work at all if the provider goes down” (e.g. yesterday’s outage) and “dependent” meaning that the service would continue to operate but with some amount of degradation of service. It’s a spectrum. Yesterday we saw that some services could not operate at all when Bing was down.

Disclaimer: I work at Brave.

Qwant was not usable yesterday during the Bing outage so that pretty much shows they cannot function without Bing (even if they do have some auxiliary indexes of some sort)

Qwant also relies on Bing (and was not usable during yesterday's incident)

What makes you think that Google would agree to such a deal?

Bing does not work me at the moment (maybe they can service partial traffic? Unclear if it’s better/worse than a few hours ago when the outage started)

Thanks! At the moment we are not observing any 500s on our end so it would definitely be very useful to get a screen recording so that we can pin-point any issue that you are facing.

Please see my answer to another similar message of yours here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40452726

Brave Search is fully independent and does not rely on Bing whatsoever so any 500 is unrelated to this incident.

Hey, Brave engineer here. Brave Search is up and running (thanks to our fully independent index and no reliance on Bing whatsoever). Any 500 error is unrelated to the Bing incident.

Would you be able to share a query if the 500 happens consistently? We’ll look into it.

Thanks for your help, I hope that helps,

The status page says it's been resolved 8 minutes ago (Apr 05, 2024 - 08:48 UTC): https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/bnkkbj90yhz6

But it definitely still happens now (500s on refresh on PRs and GitHub actions)

Edit: still ongoing

Edit 2: still ongoing at Apr 05, 2024 - 08:56 UTC (keeping updated for the record since their status page cannot be trusted apparently)

Edit 3: I see they have switched to a different (ongoing) incident ID now: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/5ly0psff2s5d

Not fully down but experiencing elevated error rate with 500s since a few minutes.

Thanks for confirming, we've just deployed some improvements to better handle VPN traffic and penalize legit users less. I hope this improves your QoL on Brave Search.

Hi, Brave engineer here,

I'd like to mention that when you subscribe to Brave Search premium, it is completely decoupled from the searches you then make (no way for us to link your email to your searches) by relying on blinded tokens to prove that you are premium, but without the backend knowing which account (and using one new token per search in order to avoid being able to build search sessions).

I hope that helps,