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Google Privacy The Internet

Brave Removes Google as its Default Search Engine (thurrott.com) 25

Posted by BeauHD from the good-riddance dept.
As Paul Thurrott reports, Brave is removing Google Search as its default search engine. From the report: Going forward, the Brave web browser will default to Brave Search. "Brave Search has grown significantly since its release last June, with nearly 80 million queries per month," Brave CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich says. "Our users are pleased with the comprehensive privacy solution that Brave Search provides against Big Tech by being integrated into our browser. As we know from experience in many browsers, the default setting is crucial for adoption, and Brave Search has reached the quality and critical mass needed to become our default search option, and to offer our users a seamless privacy-by-default online experience."

Brave Search is built on top of an independent index, and doesn't track users, their searches, or their clicks, the firm says. And starting with Brave 1.3 on desktop and Android, and Brave 1.32 on iOS, it will be the default search engine in the browser, instead of Google, in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It is also replacing Qwant in France and DuckDuckGo in Germany, and Brave says that more locales will be added in the next several months. Existing users can keep their chosen search engine default, of course, and new users who prefer other search engines can configure as needed. Brave Search doesn't display ads today, but the free version of the service will soon be ad-supported. An ad-free Premium version is coming "in the near future," Brave says. Along with this search engine news, Brave announced the Web Discovery Project (WDP), "which it describes as a privacy-preserving system for users to anonymously contribute data to improve Brave Search results," writes Thurrott. "The WDP is an opt-in feature that protects user privacy and anonymity by ensuring that contributed data is not linked to individuals, their devices, or any set of users." It has a GitHub repo available to help you learn more about this system.
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Brave Removes Google as its Default Search Engine More

Brave Removes Google as its Default Search Engine

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  • Never heard of them (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RockDoctor ( 15477 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @07:34PM (#61908415) Journal
    It's possibly a good idea for editors to not assume that some obscure startup that they know about, isn't known to all of their readers.

    Brave.Com [brave.com] are offering a new browser which claims to provide

    • Invasive ads blocked
    • Cross-site trackers blocked
    • Cookies blocked
    • Fingerprinting blocked (cookie-less trackers)
    • Malware & phishing protection
    • No IP addresses collected
    • Anonymized network routing (Tor mode)

    - -which seems to be pretty much the feature list that I get from Firefox, NoScript and AdBlock.

    Whether there is any other benefit to using it, I'm unaware and can't be bothered researching further.

    The strength of Brave.Com's adherence to ideas of user privacy an be seen in that I have to manually whitelist their site in NoScript. Clearly they are trying something nefarious on their website, even if it's not on the list of "stuff we don't do".

    Moving swiftly on to the next story ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      The nice thing about Brave is it's available on Android. As far as I know, Chrome/FF on Android doesn't allow plugins.

      • The nice thing about Brave is it's available on Android. As far as I know, Chrome/FF on Android doesn't allow plugins.

        Firefox on Android DOES allow plug-ins.

        But, a year ago, with the great change of FF mobile, many plug-ins got broken. They are slowly (quite slowly if you ask me) repairing those.

        But the things/staples you want in mobile, like uBlock, privacy badger and https everywhere work.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          Good to know. Thank you. Obviously I haven't checked in a while. Really odd though, that's how I found out about Brave was Googling "mobile browser ad block" or something like that. Would have thought one of the best top results would have been FF+plugin.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          Of course, using a browser that has that either stable extension api (which after a couple of rounds, Firefox seems to have demonstrated they don't) or having the add-on features core to the browser is a potentially nice thing to consider.

          I don't think they'll see success, but their concept of opt-in advertising with rewards is at least conceptually interesting.

          I switched to the browser recently to not have to bother with quite as many extensions, and the chromium base + better advertising experience baked

      • That's not a nice thing, it's just a thing.

      • Re:Never heard of them (Score:4, Interesting)

        by CaptQuark ( 2706165 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @02:19AM (#61909173)

        I switched from Firefox to Brave on my tablet after Firefox changed the way they handled tabs.

        Firefox stopped displaying individual tabs at the top of the interface and requires you to click on the tabs icon and select from a list or grid just to change which tab I wanted to view, or to close a single tab. This might be helpful when using a cell phone in portrait orientation, but it is less helpful on a tablet in landscape mode. They also removed standard tab shortcut keys like Ctrl-W to close a tab, which had been supported in previous versions. They aren't missed by touch-screen users but keyboard user's complaints are being ignored.

        Firefox claims to revert to the tab interface when the horizontal display is wider than 1000 pixels, but it isn't currently working that way making tablet users extremely frustrated.

        Twice Firefox for Android ignored my setting of "Do not automatically update". The first time I manually reinstalled version 79 which handled tabs as expected. The second time it automatically updated to the new version despite my settings, I moved to Brave.

        --

    • They've been around for years and have been covered several times in stories on this site.

      Just because you never heard of them isn't a good reason to assume other people are as out of touch as you are.

      • It's about editorial standards, not a specific bit of technical knowledge. When I did volunteer work on a (non-commercial) newspaper, my editor (who was also a part-time paid lecturer in Journalism at the local college) would have torn a strip off me for making such assumptions in a publication. Just because we weren't a billion-dollar turnover multinational publication is no reason to let standards slip. (We were, as a local newspaper with zero paid staff, sold in 4 countries though.)

        • An account number that low and you’re complaining about editorial standards? Did you fall into a 20 year coma immediately after creating it?

    • >"Whether there is any other benefit to using it, I'm unaware and can't be bothered researching further. "

      It is YAC. Yet Another Chrom*
      I wouldn't call that a benefit, however.

    • That's a good thing, because they claim their strength is user privacy but their business model is making money off of ads. I believe they also reward people who watch ads with some crypto, which is why this is advertised everywhere because if the browser is more widely spread, their crypto value goes up

  • Google Competitor (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuperSiayuan ( 8891837 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @08:43PM (#61908615)
    I think we should all be supportive of the fact that they're trying to compete with Google. How many companies out there have a browser and search engine that can stand toe to toe with Google? Their mobile browser is hands down the best out there.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by msimm ( 580077 )
      Brave is a Chromium [brave.com] based browser so more of a repackaging than a competitor. However they used to claim it was de-googled but that [brave.com] claim seems to be a bit watered down to "by making many changes (and subtractions) from default Chromium, including disabling or removing privacy-harming Chromium features, proxying communication with Google services through Brave servers, and reimplementing sync to be encrypted client-side and never touch Google’s servers. All of these changes help prevent Google from tr
    • You can't be serious. You don't compete with a foe using a weapon that they have created
  • I'm more curious on how their search engine performs. So I might have to download Brave and run it for a few days or so.

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