Just started testing Brave Search, and it scored a rare 100 on the first test: If you type in the name of a favorite boutique hotel, will you get that hotel's true website -- or the usual hairball of third-party intermediaries?
(For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.)
Brave gets it right. Bing, Google and even DuckDuckGo do not.
> (For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.)
That's utterly backwards IME. On Booking.com, most modifications are the push of a button (that, crucially, is right there in the UI that I already know) and if I need to do something complex I can send a message and they'll sort it and get back to me. On a boutique hotel website, maybe I'll get a phone number that I have to look up the international dialing code for and then call in that country's business hours, if their website isn't just completely broken.
Here’s something else — the most critical part of a booking — the booking itself. Go talk to third party aggregator chat bot when you realise you don’t even have a booking that you booked.
4-5 days later if you’re lucky you’ll receive an apology email if you’re lucky, which mentions that they do not want you have that experience and they’ve send it for feedback to the relevant team.
I rarely book hotels via third party aggregators now. Either direct or I use my employee’s travel assistance parter portal where I have same protections as my work travel just that I’ll have to pay from my pockets.
If your hotel double books you, they're out of rooms and can't help. If Booking.com double books you, they can pull strings to give you a different room in any hotel on their site (and they do). I don't doubt you had that experience personally, but it doesn't match my experience at all, and I spend 1/3 of my life in hotels.
If a hotel double booked you and you showed up, the hotel would walk you to a nearby similar hotel all paid for by the hotel. The “walk” process is a standard industry practice.
Having to walk a guest when the hotel cannot meet the terms of the reservation is part of the contract between the big hotel brands and franchisors. If the hotel operators do not fulfill the walk policy, then you should contact the 800 number for Marriott/Hilton/IHG/Choice/Wyndham/etc and they will mail you a check for your expenses and bill the hotel owner.
This thread started about “boutique hotels” and now we’re talking about franchisees of major national chains. They’re not the same. Plenty of tiny unfranchised operations can you leave you hanging with little to no recourse.
I worked a few years as a night manager in a hotel in Norway - we always had to figure out a solution when overbooked - at "our" expense (customer pays/pre-paid agreed upon price, we cover room and transport at alternative accommodation - usually more expensive).
As a bonus re: booking.com - they integrated with our booking system and always overbooked, unless our system lied about available rooms (would happily sell rooms when none were available - especially annoying at night, when a booked room typically means an occupied room).
Or maybe booking.com is actually a better experience for most people than the legacy hotel sites. It's more streamlined, it's cheaper, you don't have to sign up etc.
If you think I'm an astroturfer look at my comment history, I've never mentioned hotels before.
When was the last time you booked direct with a hotel where they were overbooked and they refused to walk you to another hotel when you showed up? Which hotel is it? We can call them up to ask them to clarify their policy.
Edit: Here's more information since you're not familiar with the walk policy.
Those are all about big corporate chains, which have many of the same advantages as something like booking.com. We were talking about boutique hotels. If you really want I can tell you the place in Aachen where it last happened to me and you can call them up, but I guarantee they don't have "policies", and probably not anyone who speaks English.
I showed up at a (cheap) hotel booked on Booking.com earlier this year. They had no record of my booking. They couldn't help me.
I spent the next hour on the phone or on hold with a booking.com rep. They claimed the hotel had made a mistake and should be the one to fix it. They attempted to contact the appropriate person at the hotel but were unable to.
About four hours later somebody appropriate from the hotel responded to the booking.com rep and "found" the "lost" booking.
I brought up the policy you mentioned, and the booking.com rep told me that they hotel gets a chance to fix it first. They seemed quite surprised the hotel ghosted them for four hours, and told me that eventually at some point at night they would book me some other room.
So I'd say the booking.com policy you mentioned isn't quite as valuable as you might think at first.
If you’re booked 3rd party you’re much more likely to be the one bumped I. The first place. You’re also likely to get the least desireable rooms on the least desireable floors.
That does not match my experience. IME the bumping is first and foremost dependent on the time of arrival. While the hotel has rooms, they will give them out to those who booked and show up. Should the hotel run out due to overbooking, how the next guest booked a room is not going to matter. My 2c.
Big sophisticated hotels have blocks of rooms at different price points. So, even if there are rooms currently empty but have been reserved for customers who have paid higher price, they won't give them to you.
In recent years, I have not had any booking problems whatsoever. Only problem I had more than 10 years ago was about arriving very late and finding that my room reservation had been released and they were full. Luckily it was a big chain hotel which had another property nearby and was able to get me a room there for the night and then resume my original room for the rest of the week long stay. This was very busy conference week and all 3+ star hotels were full in the area.
> even if there are rooms currently empty but have been reserved for customers who have paid higher price, they won't give them to you.
In my experience (not very big hotel) - the emphasis was on full occupancy - rooms would only be held (with other guest with booking at the counter) in rare circumstances (eg we knew an incoming flight was delayed and we were certain the other guest would arrive. Even then we might bump the other guest if it meant we had more time to scramble to find an alternative room for the guest that hadn't shown up yet).
I'll tell you a story about Booking.com. I booked an ostensibly available hotel in Ouray, CO in fairly peak season. I got there and they of course, had already sold the booking beforehand and because the systems didn't link up correctly Booking's availability was not updated. It was the hotel's fault, but it didn't matter. Not a single other hotel in Ouray had availability, and, if you happen to know the area, anything that resembles a hotel outside of Ouray is going to be a significantly long drive.
Booking.com was zero help at all when I called them. None. They couldn't find or book me another hotel, and basically just told me that there was nothing they could do besides refund my money.
There are many, many stories like this.
Don't get me wrong, I actually like Booking. I think it's a great way for smaller properties to get visibility without having to build and maintain that web presence themselves. But when it goes wrong, don't expect them to go to bat for you. They are incentivized to keep making money, and threatening to delist hotels for fucking over customers when the hotel clearly messed up is clearly not a game they have decided to play.
I always book directly with the hotel if I can, because, if you do that, the shit that I mentioned just doesn't happen. Sure, if it's double the price, I'll roll the dice with Booking. But it basically never is. If it's something like 5-10% of the nightly price extra, I'll pay that premium to not have to deal with any BS. Usually it's the exact same price anyway, if it's an available option (there are some hotels that literally only survive via Booking these days).
> Not a single other hotel in Ouray had availability, and, if you happen to know the area, anything that resembles a hotel outside of Ouray is going to be a significantly long drive.
> Booking.com was zero help at all when I called them. None. They couldn't find or book me another hotel, and basically just told me that there was nothing they could do besides refund my money.
I get that you were in a very difficult position, but if there weren’t any hotel rooms, what were you expecting Booking.com to do? And what did the hotel do to help you?
> I always book directly with the hotel if I can, because, if you do that, the shit that I mentioned just doesn't happen.
Of course it does. Booking.com didn't invent double bookings.
My point is that they aren’t on the side of the booker. They are on the side that makes them the most money. Incentives are not aligned to provide the best possible experience for consumers. I would have expected them to at least say “this is not ok, we are looking into this relationship with this hotel. We own responsibility for this hotel that we ostensibly vetted to be adequately integrated with our systems to not fuck you, and they did. After all, we advertised them as a booking on our site”.
But they didn’t do any of that. They just said, sorry, can’t help you. Which is fine, but be aware of that and don’t sing their praises from the rooftops and advocate for them by saying “why would you not use them over booking first party?”
Yes, but you are blaming them for being unable to resolve what appears to be an unresolvable problem that a hotel you booked directly wouldn’t be able to help with either. Incentives don’t matter there if nobody is in a position to do anything.
I think Booking.com is by far more reliant upon repeat customers than hotels. If a hotel screws up a booking, sure the customer isn’t going to come back but they probably weren’t even if they had a good experience – people travel to lots of different places. If Booking.com screws up a booking, they very probably lost a repeat customer – Booking.com gets used again and again even when people travel to many different places. Booking.com’s incentives are more closely aligned with the traveller than the hotel’s are.
A reasonable approach would seem to be to confirm the booking with the property within, say, 24 or 48 hours so if it’s overbooked you’ve at least got a chance of getting something else.
Perhaps you misinterpreted my above comment. I don’t blame booking for my poor experience with that hotel, merely their response to the situation.
If what you say is true, I would think that there would be evidence of some sort of punitive action from booking.com for poor behavior like this. As far as I know, such evidence does not exist.
Strangely, at least in Australia, you often pay more for booking directly. On multiple occasions I've checked a hotel's website and found aggregators with cheaper rates, then literally walked in the front door and asked what's the best they can do. It's worse and I end up getting my wife to book on her mobile phone from the parking lot and let her complete the check-in.
Don't get me wrong, generally not a fan of middlemen. But the experience when booking a hotel directly comes down to the owners/management, and it's going to vary wildly compared to one of these big aggregators.
I've heard booking.com forbids them to charge first-party customers less than the booking.com price, and the hotel is beholden to the site for income so they play along. The only people booking directly are basically idiots, so for those people they charge as much as they can.
In the UK there are large chains such as Travelodge who have pulled out from booking.com entirely and made people go to their site.
Booking.com requires the cheapest price, unless you are talking about the price from the hotel’s rewards program, which they will push very hard. It’s a contract loophole that works out for everyone except the non-savvy (or privacy-conscious) consumer.
That's simply not true. I just did search to see if anything has changed. I searched for hotels in the Seattle area for a 5/18 reservation. The 3rd item in a hotel's result [1] is the direct hotel's price. It matches the same reservation on the hotel's website [2]. Another hotel's result [3] has the lowest price as direct booking.
Similar dynamic with credit cards, where retailers are forbidden from offering a cash discount. Though some skirt this using rewards programs— in Canada for example, Canadian Tire gives you more Canadian Tire "money" if you pay with debit or cash.
In fairness, if credit card processors hadn't been permitted to require that and customers had had to pay the fee, credit cards would never have achieved liftoff.
Which is maybe as much of an argument as any, if it had put pressure on the processors to minimize or eliminate the fee and find alternative revenue streams to sustain themselves and build out the network. Instead we got a world where the fee has been static forever and the gains from automation have gone to cashback and rewards programs for customers, ultimately making it more expensive to pay with cash.
For reference: to be part of a hotels “rewards program” just requires you to create a free account.
What privacy concerns are you alleviating by not signing up for the hotels loyalty program? They are going to ask for ID when you get there and many require a credit card hold.
You can read the terms of service and privacy agreement for that "free account" to find out.
In general, the Hotel would not be offering a rewards program if it did not benefit them more than it cost. At the very least they are going to use your "free account" to try to get you to use that Hotel (chain) more.
They will be getting that information from you anyway when you check in.
Who do you think is more likely to sell your information to third parties - a hotel brand that has every incentive to keep your information to themselves or an aggregator?
> cost. At the very least they are going to use your "free account" to try to get you to use that Hotel (chain) more.
And a third party aggregator won’t try to get you to use their site more?
> except the non-savvy (or privacy-conscious) consumer.
Every single hotel I have been to already requires your ID and records your information at check in. In fact, it is required by pretty much all city laws in the US.
I also would not want to stay in a hotel that does not require it.
The rewards programs use your information to market to you, and sometimes third parties. Terms and conditions vary. As always, consult a lawyer before clicking accept on any EULA.
Of course they do. Grocery stores, airlines, car rentals, hotel brands, retail stores, everyone has a rewards program for a discount and they all have my info.
So far I do not receive any junk mail other than credit card offers, which I take advantage of for the bonus.
While I didn't downvote you, I'm one of those "idiots" who tends to book directly on hotel web sites because I'm a member of several free-to-join hotel loyalty programs. The aggregators generally do not beat prices available for members (which, again, I can be for free). It's not uncommon for me to find specials, room types, or even availability, period, available on the direct sites that the aggregators don't have. And I have never once been told "sorry, we can't find your reservation" if I book on the direct website, whereas I absolutely have run into that issue -- albeit generally with independent hotels and B&Bs -- when booking through aggregators.
But, sure, I'm obviously an idiot! I'm just over here drooling stupidly while I get better and/or cheaper hotel rooms.
Thanks for your response. I apologise, the term "idiots" was definitely over-the-top - while there are people who are paying more than they should, I didn't know about the loyalty programs (which makes me the idiot). Maybe it's a US-centric thing. In any case I understand that your experience with booking direct has been better than using third party.
The annoying thing is that should so obviously be the case! Booking direct should always be cheaper and better, right? But I've found that even if booking.com is cheaper the hotel refuses to match the price when booking directly. And they never told me about any loyalty scheme :/
I didn't downvote you, but I did notice that you are making repeated assertions about price disparity between direct and third party; multiple people are posting actual links and experiments showing you wrong; to which you more vehemently ("idiots") repeat the assertions (without evidence).
I apologised in another comment and admit it is not universally true, as many people have pointed out. However I have repeatedly tried to get hotels to price match; they don't, and they never mentioned a loyalty scheme. That is my personal experience. Of course it may differ based on the type of hotel (I don't use very expensive chain hotels), the country, etc.
I mostly deal with Hilton brand hotels for both work and our newish “hybrid digital nomad” lifestyle where we hop across cities in the US for 7 months a year.
We stayed in Hilton brand hotels for around 160 days over the last year.
You don’t get loyalty points and days don’t count toward status when booking through a third party. With Hilton, those loyalties points can account for 20%-35% toward future stays. Meaning if I spend $100, I will get points worth $20-$35 toward future stays. Based on rooms I’ve already booked this year with just points, we are staying free for 25 days in 5 cities this year. Of course point accumulation is a lot slower for most people. But there are a lot of people who stay in hotels using other folks money when traveling for business.
Most hotels chains also have a “lowest price guarantee” where they will match a price found on a third party site.
This isn’t even mentioning all of the hassle you can avoid dealing with hotels directly if things go wrong or if you just don’t like the service.
Last year, I booked a 7 day half work half personal stay in San Francisco at the Hilton Financial district. It was a run down dump. I went to the front desk, told them I would be cancelling the rest of my stay and booked another hotel - the Hilton Parc 55 - for the rest of the week.
The first hotel charged me for one night. That would have been much more of a hassle going through a third party site. First you would have to hope that Hilton gave the money back to booking.com and then go through the hassle of getting your money back from them.
On that same note, I booked a regular room at Parc 55, messaged the hotel on the app before I got there and asked did they have any free Diamond upgrades available. They upgraded me to the fitness room - with a gym inside the room - for free. You don’t get those benefits when booking through a third party.
It seems to make sense if you're going to use the same brand for a long time, yeah. I tend to stay wherever is cheapest so I haven't exploited loyalty schemes yet, but reading the comments I might be missing out.
As the guy who started the thread, I'm just glad to have provided an (accidental) portal into a whole new subdomain of HN community expertise.
We've ended up with the perfect mix of helpful insights, provocative theories, well-documented personal experiences (sample of one) -- and brief snark that gets reined in before it gets ugly.
Later on this year, I'll offer some thoughts about hotel bookings that can be nerd-sniped the other way -- into a discussion of Brave search
Well a hotel has never double booked me. A hotel in India however of Taj group (business class) took me to a much better class which was not from their group/chain in a Mercedes and put me up there for the same duration and added full meal plan from their side because my room had some problems and they were fully booked.
And booking.com? Heaven’s sake! Where do you even want me to start! First of all I can’t contact them right then. Nope I can’t! And if I do they fucking stonewall me and more than once just waved the T&C in my face. Once they fucking refused to refund because they said “I should take it with the hotel”
I mean the experience has been so shitty with TPAs that I don’t even want to look for deals now. I just call the hotel and book. They confirm and they double confirm and if anything goes wrong there’s literally a desk with more than one people 24x7. It’s just so much worth it.
If you're using hotels with Mercedes then you're booking an entire different class to the hotels I book and that may explain our difference in experiences :)
Again that's the opposite of my experience. If I've booked on Booking.com my booking is right there, on their website and in my inbox. If I book directly with the hotel, do I have a booking? Uh, maybe. Roll of the dice when I show up.
Sticking with a single big corporate chain has most of the same advantages as using a big booking site. But I never found a single chain that had hotels everywhere I wanted to go; indeed a lot of the places I end up wanting to to don't have any name brand hotels at all.
This is super interesting. I know it happens, but I'm decently traveled and I've never had it happen to me (booking directly with the hotel and having that booking not be available). I've probably stayed in at least 500 individual direct bookings with hotels in my lifetime, to at least give some numbers to the anecdata.
Re: issues w/ travel plans - I’ve gotten stranded or left SOL before. My general course of action is to just buy a new ticket/room/whatever and file a claim on my credit card. My wife cracked the bumper of a rental. Chase paid. Flight got canceled. Polish air refused to give me a refund until 6+ months later after I had filed a complaint with DOT. I booked a new (more expensive) flight and Amex covered the cost.
I did get absolutely screwed once though. Turns out you can’t book a hotel in Paris after midnight because the system rolls the date over. Ended up sleeping on a couch in the lobby that night.
I can say overall I've had OK experiences with aggregators, but my style of tourism lately has been motortourism with partially determined plans so I often book rooms a day or two ahead.
I agree though with the sentiment of a post up in the hierarchy that it's a problem that middlemen dominate the listings for hotels, restaurants and such.
I think you're talking about common modifications that the booking website understands how to make via the hotel's API. The GP, meanwhile, is talking about completely arbitrary stuff that is not part of any booking services's data schema for "modifiable properties of a booking"—and also, where the hotel likely doesn't actually have an API, because it's just some family-run thing, and the booking website is maybe just sending the hotel a fax to book for you.
In the boutique + arbitrary case, what you want is to talk to a real person, explain your issue, and get some kind of free-text note added to your booking in a way that staff will actually follow the instructions in it. You also want this to potentially increase the cost of your stay (rather than your request being denied on the basis that such a modification would increase the cost of your stay.)
If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the booking agent to make such a modification, they will have no ability to add the note to your booking in the hotel's computer in such a way that the staff will take it seriously; nor even, necessarily, the ability to confirm that that modification is something that the hotel can do for you. (They can call the hotel... but they're just as likely to be brushed off as you are.)
If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the hotel, they will tell you that they can't help you, because they want to charge you more, but they don't have the ability to charge you anything, since they're not billing you; they're billing the booking agency. And the booking agency itself has no way for a hotel to add an SKU for this kind of customization. (If it did, it'd be abused by unscrupulous hotels.) They'll then tell you that they can fix your problem if they cancel your agency booking and then re-book it through the hotel itself... but in so doing, you might not be able to keep your reservation.
If you book through the hotel, you can just speak with the hotel, and enter into whatever private direct customer-to-business deals you like with them to negotiate whatever kind of special service you want from them.
> If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the booking agent to make such a modification, they will have no ability to add the note to your booking in the hotel's computer in such a way that the staff will take it seriously; nor even, necessarily, the ability to confirm that that modification is something that the hotel can do for you. (They can call the hotel... but they're just as likely to be brushed off as you are.)
Being able to write a message and have them get back to me (even if all they're doing behind the scenes is calling the hotel) is a much better UX than having to make a phone call during business hours, particularly when there's a language barrier.
> If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the hotel, they will tell you that they can't help you, because they want to charge you more, but they don't have the ability to charge you anything, since they're not billing you; they're billing the booking agency. And the booking agency itself has no way for a hotel to add an SKU for this kind of customization. (If it did, it'd be abused by unscrupulous hotels.) They'll then tell you that they can fix your problem if they cancel your agency booking and then re-book it through the hotel itself... but in so doing, you might not be able to keep your reservation.
> If you book through the hotel, you can just speak with the hotel, and enter into whatever private direct customer-to-business deals you like with them to negotiate whatever kind of special service you want from them.
Meh, that seems like a bullshit excuse to me. If they're selling me some special add-on service, surely they can bill me for it independently of my booking. If I'm already going to the trouble of calling them (ugh), having to give my credit card details separately is not making that a whole lot worse.
The problem is that Booking.com/Expedia/etc can't be trusted to book a real reservation. You never know if they're overbooking a hotel (and indeed I've been bitten by this multiple times).
By booking with the actual hotel's web site, you at least know you have a room. If the price of that certainty is a little bit of extra UX friction (or making a phone call, which I'll soon be able to delegate to an AI anyway), that sounds just fine.
Overbooking is never the fault of third party sites, they literally make an API call in real time and ask if they have inventory available. For smaller chains and boutique hotels the backend is probably a system that is calling into the HMS in the same way Expedia would.
What you are experiencing is either the hotel manager verbally committing to rooms and not logging them into the computer to try and skim money, or they had something happen that impacted availability (no hot water, housekeeping couldn't turn over rooms, etc)
overbooking / "I've been bitten by this multiple times": Did you arrive and the hotel didn't have any spare rooms? What happened next? I have never once heard of such a thing. And you said multiple times. What kinds of hotels are these???
I use hotwire maybe a few times a year and it has happened twice to me that the hotel they claimed was booked did not have the reservation. Most 3rd party booking sites don't have real time access to inventory, so if you book close to the same time that someone books direct, you can easily end up overbooked.
I think in the first case, they gave me a refund and I rebooked another through hotwire last minute. In the other case, the area was very booked up and I had to pay double to get a comparable room. So I had to send hotwire the invoice and they refunded the rate plus enough to cover the more expensive option. Both times was a huge inconvenience but that is sort of the price you pay for cheap 3rd party bookings.
They’re often not even cheaper these days (and are usually pay in advance with no or limited cancellations, vs booking direct usually being pay on site and cancel able to to a day or two out.
Yes, I have found that in many areas, you can match or beat the 3rd party price by going direct. Especially if you have any additional discounts like AAA. But quite a few highly competitive areas like las Vegas, you can save 25-50% by going with hotwire or Priceline.
This does happen, but rarely. Family boutique hotels should not overbook. It happens more frequently at business hotels, because those tend to offer no-fee cancellations, overbook and as a result never know how many people will actually show up for the night. So folks arriving very late can be hit with "sorry, we have no rooms available". Business hotels try hard not to do this often, but it does happen.
On the receiving side, this is not pleasant, but not the end of the world. On a business trip I can get a human travel agent on the phone who can find an available room and if it means a $100 taxi bill each way to get to a nearby town, so be it.
Again that's the opposite of my experience. When I reserve on Booking.com my reservation is always there (and I can see a confirmation of it whenever I want). When I reserve directly, who knows.
Booking always tells me that are only a few rooms left in the city I am looking for and only one left at that price on the property I am looking on. Many times, the price on booking is higher than if I book directly from that hotel.
Booking.com allowed me book a room in a hotel that was closed due to renovation - which I didn't know. I learned that a week prior my trip because I messaged the property (as I had a special request) and received automatically generated reply.
Since then I book directly. Most recently I booked a hotel which had 2+1 night free. Booking.com was offering full price for 3 nights stay.
Higher compared to what? There are plenty of smaller hostels/hotels which don't even bother to have their own website (only some FB page, and Booking.com listing)
Booking.com has a higher chance for errors compared to hotels' direct bookings since its information is secondhand and unreliable. For the hotels with direct booking avenues, why use booking.com?
Because booking.com answers the question "where can I stay given place, date, and budget"? While direct access can only help you when you already know where are you going. The latter is fine if you travel to the same place many times, the former is more universal. As for reliability, I dunno, I used to travel a lot, and in my experience troubles mostly come with a particular destination, not with the method of booking. I.e. if a hotel is unreliable (poor business culture, or overbooking, or whatever), it's unrealiable.
What if the Hotel doesn't want to have a Booking.com listing in the first place but is forced to have one because search engines rank it so much higher?
You might have typoed booking.con but it is spot on.
"On a boutique hotel website, maybe I'll get a phone number that I have to look up the international dialing code for and then call in that country's business hours, if their website isn't just completely broken."
If call them on the phone that implies one can speak the language. If hotel has a website that suggests it has an email address. Not sure I would want to stay at a hotel with a broken website and no email address.
I've never had problems booking through an intermediary but the parent is correct to the extent there are some benefits to dealing directly with the hotel.
It's really sad that so-called "tech" companies and internet marketing companies have bought out the independent travel guides, took the data and made it unreasonably difficult to find the contact info for hotels online.
But we can always find the contact info in Google Maps. Frommers and Zagat both acquired and pilfered by Google. Very sad.
Here is a website that will provide the website address and the email address for each hotel.
Nobody replies on the emails nowadays. You are lucky if the mobile number mentioned matches with Telegram, Whatsapp or whatever else, or it's phone call only. I'm talking about small to medium businesses - shops, hotels, restaurants etc.
Small shops and small hotels in eastern Europe. I simply stopped trying to contact via email after several inquiries without any response. While messengers for some reason are very popular. If I already talking to someone in person and I need to send files to them then in 100% of cases they will ask to send it via some messenger. Latest cases - car insurance asked for photos, notary asked for my passport, legal consultant asked for my docs - all via messenger. No, wait, there was one case when I was asked to write an email (not a reply to email send to me, but I had to write first) by a hospital. Guess what - they didn't reply and I had to print and give them paper copies of the stuff I emailed previously.
Email is great, I use it at work all the time, internally in the company. But in the outside world it's just not working, unfortunately.
Yikes. It sounds like there is an expectation that every member of the public has these apps installed or can otherwise use them. It's difficult to fathom that any organisation could claim "Sorry, we do not have email."
Not to discount the speed and convenience of messenging apps, but if someone is playing fast and loose with the law and trying to avoid a "paper trail", then avoiding email and using "ephemeral" messenging might be a strategy.
It was once claimed, by Facebook, that "[1 in 7 people worldwide is on Facebook. More importantly,] 6 out of 7 people are not on Facebook." Perhaps more than 1 in 7 people have an email account. Just a guess.
Beyond that, boutique hotels are often substantially more expensive when you book directly. Which is weird, because you think it would be cheaper since they’re not paying the affiliate booking fees. But no, even if you call them directly or show up in person they generally refuse to match Expedia or booking.com. I am being overly general here, I’m sure there are exceptions, but this has been my experience repeatedly.
With restaurants I try to not use aggregators like doordash or Uber Eats and always make sure to call and order directly so they save on fees. But hotels seem like they would rather pay the fee rather than give a real customer the best available price and keep a larger portion of the profit.
There are many things I hate about Booking.com, but at least they do generally give the best price.
I never use Booking. Once got a terrible (and overpriced) location that was highly rated according to them, but above all - I more than once arrived only to realise my booking wasn't there.
On top of that, I hate their UX.
My first go-to is Hotel Tonight mobile, which shows how interfaces should be handled. It doesn't handle rebookings and room selections though, so I often book through a given hotel directly - usually better interfaces than booking - even if not standarised, and I had a better treatment at least once, because I booked directly.
Also, if I type in a hotel name, I want to go to the hotel website, not a middleman. Hotel's website is a proxy of hotel quality to some extent.
For what it's worth, my batting average for getting problems fixed on the phone with a real person is substantially better than trying to sort problems out on a website. To the point that phone calls are now my first resort, before even trying a business's website.
Sometimes the person on the phone suggests the website to me, but if I decline with a "well.. I'm not very good with websites" excuse [which is effectively true, given the above] they're almost always happy to handle the problem for me.
Do you mainly travel where there isn’t a language barrier? My experience is the exact opposite. Written messages are far more helpful when there is a language barrier.
If there were an alternative that didn't suck, I'd look at it. But 95% of first-party hotel websites suck massively. So what's the option? AirBNB is far worse than booking.com in the moral stakes. I guess picking one of the big hotel chains and going with them might work for some people, but no one chain has good enough coverage IME.
I typically use travel sites to search for hotels and read reviews, then just book directly with the hotel, which has never cost me more, and often less because some sites (i.e. booking) obfuscate the relationship between price and amenities/size so you don't get what you actually could get for the money if you just went to the hotel directly.
Life's too short to do direct hotel bookings. The sites are slow and terrible to navigate even when they're not straight-up broken. They never bother to tell you their cancellation policy, filling in your information is a drag and you don't get a proper calendar entry unless you make one manually.
Maybe I just know how to pick good hotels? Every single point you just mentioned has not applied to the way I typically do it, the cancellation policy is always the first thing I look for and make sure it’s clearly spelled out. I’ve never had any problems actually interacting with the sites either.
I'd be interested to know what your process is if you've got a way to reliably pick out boutique hotels whose websites don't suck without taking too long over it. E.g. I'm going to Munich in August - want to talk me through what you'd do?
Do you have a vested interest in Booking.com? Interesting that you vehemently defend a common negative experience that booking through third parties is garbage, but you only seem to be defending this particular website.
Nope, just a happy customer. I'm sure other booking websites are similar (I used to use Agoda a long time ago), but I don't want to speak outside my own experience.
I stopped using DuckDuckGo when it introduced its email relay service. This service had (and I think still does have) the peculiar requirement that the user must install a browser extension in order to use it.
I can think of no valid reason why a (supposedly privacy-respecting) email relay service should require a browser extension to be installed.
This made me realize DuckDuckGo may not actually value privacy. I stopped trusting all of its services.
> I can think of no valid reason why a (supposedly privacy-respecting) email relay service should require a browser extension to be installed.
I can answer this one: they're fine with not knowing who anyone is, but they're trying to make sure that each account maps to one real person — they're trying to prevent spammers from registering thousands of accounts to use to send spam, and from continuously registering more accounts whenever they get banned.
A browser extension that feeds their service a heartbeat packet every once in a while from a particular IP address, is a Proof of Identity. It ties the email account accessed through that browser, to a browser installation of the extension, such that you can only actively use as many email accounts as you have devices x installed browsers (which might be a surprisingly high number to you, a normal person with legitimate use-cases for multiple email accounts; but is still a problematically low number compared to the number of accounts the average spammer wants to register — especially when most of those accounts get banned in short order.)
This is a workaround for the fact that there's as-of-yet no such thing as an "anonymous identity verification service" — something like an OAuth IdP that deduplicates users on the client-to-IdP side through strong identity verification on registration (photo of your passport, webcam picture with this hand gesture, you know the drill); but then protects client anonymity on the IdP-to-service side. If you had to SSO to your DDG email through such a service, then they very likely wouldn't be asking you to install the extension.
I have two email relays from DDG and have never installed their extension nor even knew they had an extension when I got their relays. (I know now but at the time I didn't)
If you download the app on your phone, you can get a relay and then immidiately uninstall the app.
Yes, but you had to install an app. Why? They already have your email. They're forwarding email to you as part of the service. And you probably had to verify your email with them when you started using it. So why should you be required to also install either an app or a browser extension?
Doesn't the very act of installing something on your devices increase their technical ability to collect information about you and your devices? That doesn't sound very privacy-oriented.
Reading your comments made me realize how a service like DDG could never succeed. The only people who care about its advantages are the same users they lose for anything that remotely helps the company grow.
Apple is a regular company and gets points for adding privacy features. DDG? “Nah, F that, they suggested I run code on my device for a brand-new unrelated service. Reprehensible.”
Apple does add privacy though. The company does not collect and sell your data. Folks regularly read the ToS and freak out, without understanding why the ToS says what it says.
Most privacy oriented companies don't care about your data, but they need to be able to see diagnostic information about your session for when things don't work. Oh and guess what? Things don't work for many users due to all kinds of crazy stuff, with viruses, proxies, crap internet, crap browsers, crappier browser extensions, or just plain user stupidity causing 99% of it.
Diagnostic data and basic telemetry allows software engineers to find the root cause.
Most likely a feeble attempt to avoid the domain from getting blacklisted from most services by restricting the amount of relays a user can have by device.
Companies like DDG and Apple don’t do privacy. They do privacy theatre. Just that Apple is too big with too much of a PR/marketing budget and has an ultra/rabidly loyal fanbase so it works for them.
There are companies that do privacy but they’re usually too small to be noticed outside the crowd of extremely privacy conscious people.
Mozila is a famous one though. Yup, even after their Pocket fiasco and some more I do believe they try to real and long term privacy. DDG is just hustling to stand apart and then maybe hope for a financial exit. (Have had a really bad experience with the company, other than using their product - their search is unusable though - that told me they do not have a respectable culture as an organisation either).
Google usually does through the maps place card. To update that card, the hotel manager has to receive a postcard posted by google. Obviously expedia etc can't easily do that.
And the comment you replied to is saying that the official website will usually be shown on the map card to the side of your usual results, which is only editable by verified businesses.
I just put "the 252 boutique hotel" into Google (without quotes) and the first non-ad result is the hotel's own website. It's also first in Brave. And first in Bing. So no difference here.
Generally in my experience, I've never had a problem finding a hotel's website via Google.
haskell megaparsec operators -> should return [0] somewhere high in the result set. Found it on the third page of Brave Search. For comparison, it's the very first result on Google, second page for Bing, and the third page for DuckDuckGo.
Sure, it's a bit obscure, and I don't even write that much Haskell these days. But it's calibrated to determine whether I can rely on the search engine to quickly surface what I need to be productive, and whether I can trust its 'negative results' (I don't see what I want on the results page -> I need to refine my query or take a different approach). The version number returned in the URL also shows how well the engine handles keeping up with versioned documentation pages and aggregating 'link juice' between them.
I try this on every search engine alternative that pops up on HN. Very, very few pass. I find it often works like an adversarial example, yielding completely nonsensical results.
I don't know that I would rely on performance on a single search to categorize how a search engine performs even in related areas to that one search. Also, maybe this is a stupid question, but are you letting Google personalize your results? If so, the comparison becomes even more problematic.
Brave search also failed the old "office -microsoft" search by returning a ton of microsoft pages. Just to be safe I tried "office NOT microsoft" too but it was even worse.
DDG and Bing (no surprise there) fails at it too, but Google actually works.
That's the first result on Kagi, but I think that's because they just call Google behind the scenes for you.
Edit: I didn't mean this to be an insult, I pay for Kagi and use it exclusively. But actually, the Kagi and Google first page of results look fairly different for this query, so Kagi is doing more curation and ordering than I realized.
That's pretty much how all small search engines work, but with varying backing indexes. Kagi's value-add is Google quality index (since they literally pay for it), no ads, their ranking algorithm, and tools to control the results that Google doesn't give you like blacklists and your own weights.
$25/mo is unfortunately a little steep because their lower priced option with 700 searches/month is comically small. On just my work browser I have 4000 Google searches last month. Doesn't count my personal laptop or phone. It's really hard to compete with $0/mo. for Google + AdBlock. I really do like Kagi better but $25/mo. is Tailscale + Notion + Spotify.
This. Kagi is a great product and has been my daily driver for nearly a year. I honestly believe it's the best search engine on the market
But I fear they're going to have to get their prices (and relatedly, cost per search) down considerably before I can recommend them to anyone again.
I was fortunate enough to be grandfathered into an unlimited plan until March, but I don't think I know any professionals, e.g. people using a search engine to get work done, which search less than 24 times per day.
I have the early adopter professional plan, but I must admit that while I consider myself very much a power user I have never been close to even 700 searches a month.
Can you walk me through what a typical search day is like for you?
To me, the 700 soft limit seems absurd so I'm curious to hear how you interact with the product.
I average 50-100 searches per work day and 10-20 searcher per off day (totalling 1-2.5k per month). But I don't feel I'm using search in a particularly strange way.
For example, if I need to know how the new WidgetBean in SpringBoot works I'll usually end up making ~10 queries related to it before I move on to a new area of research.
E.g., I'll search "SpringBoot WidgetBean release notes" then "SpringBoot WidgetBean examples" or "WidgetBean test double", "WidgetBean in MockMvc test", "WidgetBean PowerMock known issues in MockMvc test", "WidgetBean FooService interation in MockMvc test SpringBoot 3".
Essentially, when I'm searching I go wide to survey the information landscape, then refine my search term as I discover what I actually need to know
This quickly balloons as I'm expected to know many things at $dayjob :)
(UTC) Searches
Apr 2023 311
Mar 2023 495
Feb 2023 313
Jan 2023 434
Dec 2022 386
Nov 2022 396
Oct 2022 425
How I search:
I typically start with one of the same type of queries as you did above, then I open every interesting-looking page from the first query in a nested tab (I use tree style tabs in my "research" browser) and start reading them, ctrl-clicking again to open interesting links in new tabs nested in a new level beneath, closing pages that was clearly useless and bookmarking in raindrop if I immediately sense that the oage I am on is something I will need again.
Once I have exhausted this tree, at least temporarily, I start a new search - like you do - in a new top level tab anf create a new tree from it.
As an early adopter, I reluctantly cancelled my Kagi plan today. It’s a great search engine, but even while just restricting it to one of my desktop machines and not using it on mobile at all, I ran up against the search limit with 10 days to go before renewal.
Not OP, but… I don’t consider myself a “power user”, but as it turns out, I use search for nearly everything: reviews, code snippets, spelling, cafes, stores, apps, news, products, files… But, perhaps, the most common type of search is when you read a text or hear something and think: “Hey, what’s that?”
And so I easily make 50–100 searches per day when I don’t even feel I’m actively searching for anything. And if I'm in a research mode, the count goes beyond that.
I noticed that only after I’ve subscribed to Kagi. After realising that I’ll burn throw the plan’s allowance very quickly, I tried doing most of my “dumb” searches via Google, and more important stuff — via Kagi. But that introduces a cognitive load, and kills the point of using a paid search engine.
Perhaps, I should switch to the $25 plan, but I can’t justify paying $250–$300 annually for a search engine, even though I have nothing against the idea of paying for one. Unfortunately, it’s too much for me. Nevertheless, I’m rooting for Kagi because it ticks all the boxes for me, and provides value. I hope that operational costs go down, and more people could use it.
Well yeah because ballparking at somewhere around 7k monthly searches that would be a hundred dollar monthly bill or a two hundred dollar bill if I wanted API because team plans increase the search cost for some reason.
To be fair this is why the $25 plan exists but if the economics are to be believed is totally unsustainable. For me 1.5¢/search is a really awkward spot. Fixed cost unlimited and GPT cheap pricing of $0.000002/token hit "use without thinking" status but at 1.5/2.5¢ I could actually rack up a rather large bill by accident so it causes me to use the service less.
They do provide a "soft limit" (which you get a notification when you reach) and a "hard limit" (which the system won't let you exceed) as options in your billing settings. I think by default they set the hard limit to $5, precisely to stop people racking up large bills by accident.
They have API access to Google but there is clearly a sprinkling of magic and logic between.
How can I know?
The magic is proven by the fact that Kagi mostly respect my queries (or accept my bug reports if I can prove they didn't) despite being built on the shaky foundation of Bing and modern Google.
Also there is some good old fashioned engineering there, like allowing me to pin, prioritize higher or lower or block certain sites.
I'm moving my comment here because I'm not sure why people are repeating the false information about 3rd parties providing lower prices than direct booking because of some contracts.
That's simply not true. I just did a search now to see if anything has changed. I randomly searched for hotels in the Seattle area for a 5/18 reservation. The 3rd item in a hotel's result [1] is the hotel's direct booking price. It matches the same reservation on the hotel's website [2]. Another hotel's result [3] has the lowest price as direct booking. Again for another hotel in NYC [4], the 3rd item is the hotel's direct price.
Huh, interesting idea. I personally deliberately book though Booking and alike because it's so nice to have everything hotel related in one place especially when having long trips.
I always buy directly from the hotel assuming that I will be treated better due to the hotel earning more money from me due to not having to pay commission to a travel agent.
Also, I assume there is less probability of errors since when you reserve on a travel agent website, your reservation goes through an additional system before it gets to the hotel.
I worked for a travel startup for a bit and after that experience I only book airfare and hotels directly.
Specifically with airfare, a 3rd party is not allowed to sell for less than the airline directly, so it's always better options since it is much easier to reschedule/cancel/refund directly with the airline. Plus, if you travel a lot, it is better to find a favorite airline and stick to them. Any bonus "features" offered by a 3rd party I can assure you are either not in your interest or actually a scam.
I don't know if the pricing rules applies to hotels, but I'd rather pay extra then get to the hotel and be screwed over last minute because some 3rd party is trying something "clever" behind the scenes and it turns out it ruins your travel plans.
Most contracts between an OTA and a hotel chain included language requiring no lower price when I worked for an OTA 10 years ago. Not sure about today, but would not surprise me that nothing changed. OTA's are useful as a comparison but you are always better off going direct. Other than TripAdvisor, most OTA brands are either owned by Expedia or Priceline, but they never let you know.
> Specifically with airfare, a 3rd party is not allowed to sell for less than the airline directly, so it's always better options since it is much easier to reschedule/cancel/refund directly with the airline.
The last couple of flights I booked with Star Alliance were the same price on Lufthansa.com etc., but I got free checked luggage on booking.com/expedia and just hand luggage on lh.com.
Also, if you have to change anything with the airline and you book through a third party, you either have to deal with the third party (and a painful phone call for Priceline) or they charge an extra fee like American.
I've tried to do this for years and ultimately been disappointed. Even on my latest hotel booking, the direct quote was 20% more than Expedia and that's not an isolated incident.
I suspect this is partly predatory pricing on behalf of Expedia (charge the hotel 30%, discount the price 20%, get all the bookings and take the difference.) Yet I really can't justify spending the extra $400 to stand the moral high ground. Seems like something the hotels need to work out.
They used to at least offer the same price and add in little things like "free wifi" and breakfast. I haven't seen that offer since the pre-covid years.
A few times Ive literally used an aggregator booking site at the lobby desk after asking to stay longer, and the hotels price is higher than online.
I've assumed they do this as a combination of lazy tax plus they don't want to undercut aggregators as these might stop showing them if they know people will go direct to the hotel after searching.
I agree; I’ve had multiple instances recently of booking through a third party where getting changes or refunds is very slow and clunky, if they will even do it at all. Contrast that to my experience with booking a hotel directly through their website, where I mistakenly booked the wrong dates. One phone call to the hotel and 2 minutes later they changed it with no hassle.
> I assume there is less probability of errors since when you reserve on a travel agent website, your reservation goes through an additional system before it gets to the hotel
My intuition says the opposite. More moving pieces in the system, more fragility in integration of different systems.
I see, but I was thinking the “Also” at the beginning of the second sentence attaches the conditions of the first sentence. So the second sentence could also be understood to start with “I always buy directly from the hotel…”
Nevertheless, there is clearly a more clear way I could have wrote that comment.
> I always buy directly from the hotel assuming that I will be treated better due to the hotel earning more money from me due to not having to pay commission to a travel agent.
I have never found this to be true unfortunately. I have some conference related travel coming up, and the conference made some deal with Hilton for a special rate. Hilton's link wouldn't work, and I made 5 calls trying to get them to offer a discounted rate to no avail. Eventually had to book at a discounted rate on hotwire (same as the conference's rate), which presumably made Hilton 20-30% less. At scale, hotels are just operated like commodities. Unless you are really special (loyal and big spender), you won't get any special treatment.
> Unless you are really special (loyal and big spender), you won't get any special treatment.
Lifetime Platinum Marriott member here.
The special treatment is OK. It is nice to get room upgrades and freebies, but that's little stuff. It doesn't get you a room magically when they are sold out, and you don't magically get a better rate when prices are high.
The biggest benefit if you're traveling a lot is your points accrual rate is higher with status, which lets you more rapidly exchange points for things. The only sane way to spend points of course, is more hotel stays. Nothing else comes close value-wise. I recall running the numbers on that (points/dollar ratio), and you'd be a brazen fool to spend points on merchandise - when you compare the ratio of hotel stays to merchandise point cost, you realize that they have a 3-4x markup on the merchandise.
>don't magically get a better rate when prices are high.
That's when you spend your points. Though it depends severely on the brand. Marriott and Hilton are no longer great. But Wyndham and Hyatt are pretty amazing. Starwood, used to be good until Marriott bought them out.
Hotel brands franchise the properties and hotel owners and management vary and change so much the best option, I have found, is to check flyertalk or other forums for recent reviews.
I imagine it's booking.com requirement that the hotel can't sell cheaper thought its own website, just like credit card companies forbid discounts for paying cash.
All the big hotel chains will usually give ~5% off for reserving directly since they pay ~15% to OTAs. They will require you to be a “rewards member”, but that is just checking a box since you already have to give them your personal information.
I got the feeling that it's the opposite. We pay the Booking fee. I've had hotel receptionists give me their card and say "If you come back some other time, just call to reserve directly with us, so you can save the x% that Booking charges for your reservation!"
The hotel has a room they want to sell for $100 a night. They can list it on their website for $100 a night, and after paying credit card processing fees, they get to keep the remainder.
The hotel now lists the same room on one of the booking sites that charges a x% fee for facilitating the transaction and providing discovery for the hotel (getting the room in front of interested customers). The hotel can either take a x% haircut, or charge x% more. So that same room might be $110 per night now instead of $100.
It's a business decision, and not all operators will make the same one, naturally.
I took it as "of course we'll charge you the x% of Booking, so reserve with us if you want to save it". But it makes sense that not all operators will act the same.
I would wager your more luxurious, expensive hotels have enough "cushion" to absorb these fees - while your standard hotels may not.
You see similar things on online marketplaces, such as Amazon. Amazon's commission fee can be anywhere from 15%-30%, depending on the category. Unless there's huge margin baked into the product price, you may very well be paying 15-30% more for the product on Amazon. Not always, of course, as it does come down the the business and the strategy they've chosen.
That, and the discounts they offer are weirdly misaligned with what I actually book and could possibly want. If a discount happens to actually be applicable for a trip I want to make, booking.com usually is still cheaper. But then I've never managed to get a better deal booking with a hotel directly, usually it's significantly more expensive with more restrictive cancellation policy, which is a shame as I don't really trust booking.com et al. Maybe it works like that because I'm in Europe and mostly booking there?
I respect your experience, but third-party sites are cheaper than the true website and hotels refuse to match it even if you ask them. Even if adjustments are easier (and in my experience Booking.com has been fine), it doesn't offset the price difference.
I stay in hotels a lot though, if you travel occasionally and on special occasions I can absolutely understand.
I totally agree that this is a great sign. I'm a bit more pessimistic though - a search engine's willingness to actually let you click through to an organic search result is a function of A) how dominant in the search market they are, and therefore how much they can afford to jerk users around, and B) how mature they are economically, since growth is more difficult later in the life of the company.
This is to say that I don't trust Brave to keep doing things right as their incentives evolve. Trust is a finicky thing, but from the outset they strike me as an organization with lofty commercial intentions. And, I admit, I don't think I can trust anything Brendan Eich does.
Do you have any specific one in mind? Because while it's nice to blame Google, my experience has been quite different.
I just tried the last two boutique hotels I stayed at. For one in Tel Aviv the Google and Brave results were exactly the same. First was the hotels' own website, second was tripadvisor, third was booking.com.
The other in Buenos Aires, Google had the same order (hotel, then trip, then booking), Brave did not. Brave showed booking.com, then hotel website, then tripadvisor.
I’m pretty sure that’s how, say, Expedia makes their money. Traditional hotel reservation permit very late cancellation (24hrs typically). Hotels are willing to offer a reduced rate if you promise to not cancel.
So Expedia is just a front for that other class of bookings that are non-cancellable and they skim a profit from that. Hotels save face as they can just fingerpoint if someone complains yet they gain by getting the non-cancelable bookings.
This is not true. I use agoda, there is nothing that cannot be resolved on agoda. I once accidentally booked a hotel 1 year in advance instead of 1 month, when I arrived the hotel pointed out the error. I rang agoda, they rang the hotel and I watched as the woman in front of me answered the phone, they adjusted the booking to today and I got checked in. The whole thing was resolved in less than 10 minutes. No extra cost or fees.
Wow it is. The maps are fast to load too. (as is anything you do in brave search, where as google maps is so slow, and a pain to view search results on too)
I hope Brave releases a dedicated maps tab soon. (I realise it's just openstreetmaps, but it's a clean and easy to use version)
The convenience of hitting the back button and looking at other pages about them. Booking is the first page I want to check but not the only one. Sometimes I won't hit back, but my browsing habits are informed by being able to hit back.
How is it that Brave managed to build an indexer and remove dependence on Bing in less than two years but DuckDuckGo hasn't been able to do it in a decade.
DDG probably doesn't want to? On the time horizons they're thinking about, it's probably more expensive to develop competitive tech and keep it working than it is to pay for API access.
"Today Brave announced the acquisition of Tailcat, the open search engine developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz, a holding of Hubert Burda Media. Tailcat will become the foundation of Brave Search..."
Seems so. Same references to Hubert Burda Media being the majority holder if I follow links from that mozilla post to the Cliqz Github repo, then back to their website.
The search index is relatively easy, the ad marketplace is hard. DDG is likely hooked on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Bing revenue which is a tough habit to kick.
Once you’re hooked on Google or Bing search ads for revenue, they can control everything you are allowed to do within a product via compliance requirements. It’s a clever and effective form of regulatory capture.
After the invasion of Ukraine they announced they would be removing sites "associated with Russian disinformation." They haven't provided a definition of what that includes.
Lots of DDG users were upset because this is the type of thing they objected to with Google.
In DDG's defense, some of the censorship was required by law - we don't know if DDG went further than demanded - and Eich himself will tell you that Brave had to remove some results as well.
No, I never said we removed anything due to some nation state's MiniTrue calling it misinformation or disinformation.
All search engines must comply with laws (CSAM, right to be forgotten or whatever it is called now) in various regions. That compliance is not in any way the same category as what DDG boasted in March 2022 that it was doing.
But DDG did not have to virtue-signal as it did in March 2022 due to force of law or even unlawful threats from a nation-state. Categorically different -- there's no comparison.
Thanks for the heads up, this will certainly affect how (and how often) I use DDG in the future.
I despise disinformation and war propaganda, but I decide for myself what content falls in those categories – I don't need my search engine to decide it for me.
If they censor "misinformation" in one case, what's to stop them from censoring other "misinformation"?
Maybe the COVID lab leak theory is deemed misinformation and removed from your search result. But it's not 100% proven either way, who is to say that this is "misinformation"?
It's one thing to suggest an opinion that's just more popular, it's another to remove the competing opinions
You know that reasoning can be applied to literally any removal right? There's _tons_ of stuff that it would be pretty reasonable to remove (and I'm sure you'd agree that things like CP shouldn't be on there etc.). There's also plenty of stuff that they would likely _have_ to remove if the state told them to (I don't have direct evidence of this happening, so take it as a hypothetical), while this isn't necessarily a _good_ thing, it's also not a slippery slope.
I'd also like to highlight the thing where you implied that Russian state propaganda is just an opinion or a theory (and therefore just as valid as any other innocuous opinion or theory), which is at best intellectually dishonest.
CP and unlawful content is what the state forces them to remove. Other opinions are exactly the slippery slope I am talking about.
Russian propaganda is propaganda and lies, but if you remove one type of lies, then why not COVID misinformation? No government is FORCING them to any of this, so it's a slippery slope
It's a search engine's job to rank results; there is no other way to do it: only one link can be in position #1, only one link can be in position #2, etc.
Or in other words: "editorial guidance" is pretty much the entirety of a search engine's job: you give it a large set of documents (the internet), some user input (what you typed in the search box), and it ranks – or "editorializes" – the set of documents to something useful for you.
And at the same time you also have to account for SEO haxx0rs and outright malicious actors who will try to phish your CC details.
Do you want some crackpot website if you search for "Barrack Obama" which claims that he is literally the anti-Christ to be at #1? Or even on the first page at all? Or rolexxxx.com if you search for "buy rolex"? Or bank-of-amerrrica.ru if you search for "Bank of America"? Probably not. A naïve ranking algorithm will end up with that.
There is no perfect way to do this; it's a hard problem. Platitudes like this make it sound easy, but it's not.
There is a massive difference between ranking stuff based on relevance and not getting RT articles when... searching for RT. (They rolled back the block pretty quickly, so they seem to agree with that too)
You are basically arguing for a slippery slope argument. Because they already need some editorial control to filter spam and obviously irrelevant material does not mean that every type of filtering/block listing is ok.
I personally totally get how it can be offputting to people if a search engine starts hiding websites while openly saying that they do it for a political reason. Downranking would be fine, but blocking a news source (as bad as RT is at being that) that isn't spammy or playing with SEO is just different.
Yes, I know, everything is political and all. But that's the point! Blocking RT was obviously more so about politics than filtering fake news or trash results.
It pretty much was just about fake news and trash results, actually. RT really is pure garbage, by its very intent and purpose.
I do agree that blocking RT outright was overreach and somewhat silly. However, I imagine it comes more from a gut feeling of disgust and "this is bullshit" then than some ultraelitist, "gotta protect the unwashed masses from harmful ideas that may bring the global order into question" motive that people in this thread seem to want DDG to have.
Yes, but they could've just blacklisted or downranked it based on already existing rules about fake news. But they instead went ahead and basically created a rule for Russian content specifically.
I don't even doubt DDGs intentions, but that's the thing... in most cases, people who want to suppress or filter out speech/news/etc usually have good intentions because as you said they genuinely think it is harmful content. That's the whole issue! And it's why it's usually such a thorny debate.
All of the examples you mentioned involved irrelevant search results (as in, I have never met a soul who wants spam & scams), whereas GP is implying he wants relevant ones.
To flip your example, if I wanted to search for "Barack Obama Anti-Christ," I'd want to get those results back, and not have DDG or whatever other authority decide categorically that I shouldn't see them.
"Editorial guidance" is a wide spectrum from favoring what the editor thinks is most relevant for the reader to the editor actively censoring content the reader wants to see for external reasons. To be charitable, I read GP as objecting to the latter and not the former.
To call what DDG is doing (or what a newspaper does when it chooses not to print your foaming, incoherent editor to the letter -- as is, you know, its right) "censorship" is just silly.
I don't think what you want exists or has ever existed. A search engine that does not exercise judgement about relevance and quality will just return noise.
> but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship.
So is all censorship.
No censor calls censorship "Censorship". An example from my country of birth:
Main Office of Control over the Press, Publications and Performances, since 1981 the Main Office of Control over Publications and Performances - the central office of state censorship in the Polish People's Republic. It was a censorship body (analogous institutions were present in all countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc) examining all forms of official information communication from the perspective of their compliance with the current state policy, and prohibiting the dissemination of unwanted information and content by the ruling communist party.
The name "The Censors" was only adopted after the collapse of communism.
I rub my eyes in amazement every time I read people on HN praising censorship and rejoicing that someone will decide for them what they can read and what they can't.
I am not able to understand how foolish one has to be to not realize that eventually the censorship organs will be used against you too.
Perhaps you think you will always hold the "correct" beliefs in which case I admire your lack of imagination.
I miss "hackers" from the 90s with some actual backbone.
I live in a country that's heading down that path. They're introducing laws at this very moment that will probably give politicians and judges unlimited power to suppress any speech on the internet. They don't call themselves censors, they use euphemisms like "autonomous internet supervision entity".
> I miss "hackers" from the 90s with some actual backbone.
Same. It boggles my mind that I can find people who accept wrongthink as a legitimate concept here on Hacker News. I wonder if those hackers left this place and if so where they are at.
Sorry, but that's not what the word means. By definition, it refers to the interception of communications between others. That's now what's happening here.
"the action of preventing part or the whole of a book, movie, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons:"
The benefits of censoring misinformation are obvious if you think about it for even a couple minutes.
If you run a community tech support forum and someone starts suggesting deletion of windows32 directory as a solution to other users issues, do you let them do that?
If some neighbor in your bbq party claims to be a doctor and goes on a rant about benefits of microdosing rat poison, do you invite them ever again?
Do you disable spam filter in your mail?
We now have malicious misinformation multiplied to internet scale by modern tech. Add LLMs in the mix and we will drown in it if no measures are taken.
You want to prevent politicians or corporations from abusing or even using censorship at all - good, implement corresponding barriers. Limit scope to clear factual misinfo and not e.g. opinions - yes, sure. Proper transparent process, recourse, rehabilitation, grace of application, oversight - absolutely, implement all of those things.
Make censorship good. Denying it is required makes no sense.
When you first think about it for a bit, it might seem logical, but when you ponder it a bit longer, it doesn't. Censorship essentially comes down to this: some folks believe they know better than others about what those others should want. There's a fitting quote: "A censor is someone who knows more than they think you should." In a world where yesterday's "misinformation" becomes today's fact, you'd have to be pretty clueless to believe that we can determine what is or isn't misinformation.
Also, honestly, the spam filter example (and the rest of your examples) is pretty ridiculous. I don't turn it off, but I'd definitely freak out if my email provider decided to censor my messages for my own good without letting me see them. If nothing else then because of how many false positives I constantly see in my spam folder.
So you are ok with using an automated censor as long as you are able to review (transparency) and revert (recourse) it's results. Like I said, just make it good.
And sure, we can't verify factuality of every claim, but I do believe there is a big enough set where we can. If you accept that all information on internet is fundamentally unverifiable, then of what use is the whole thing?
This is the critical piece of information that I think gets fumbled (and usually on purpose by the media). The word "censor" is being supercharged and abused to apply in cases I don't think it should, and also in absurd cases where no censorship is happening.
"Cases where no censorship is happening": a comedian, to a crowd of thousands, on a Netflix special getting front page treatment, complaining about their jokes being censored for being too edgy.
Cases I don't think it should include instances of websites like Twitter banning hate speech, because the consequence of Twitter banning hate speech is that a user doesn't get to use Twitter anymore. They can still do hate speech in other places, to anyone they want. Whereas the consequences of the ruling communist party banning hate speech is that you well and truly can't do it anywhere, for many reasons.
First reason, every institution will follow the policy of the ruling party the instant it's created. This isn't the case in a country like the usa: despite whining about cancellation, you can get on voat or 4chan and drop the n word all day.
Second reason, there are legislated consequences to violating the censorship of a ruling party ban. In countries like the PRC that probably means some kind of violence such as being jailed, reeducated, or possibly even tortured or shot.
This is nothing like the system we have today. Now for the second part of my thought where I acknowledge some of the subtleties of societal pressure and side effects of what some today call "censorship," or being cancelled, and how despite us not having a ruling communist party, we do seem to have less freedom that one might assume naively above.
With your name attached, drop the n word on Twitter, get banned, no jail, no torture, sure... But you might get doxxed, and you might get banned from other platforms if you're semi famous enough to warrant some place like Facebook needing to purge you for being publicly too toxic to platform. So your actions on Twitter could result in being "censored" on all platforms whose existence depends on surviving in a traditional capitalist mode of production.
But, not just platforms, as we saw entire platforms themselves that try to host this kind of content can be themselves deplatformed by the very internet itself if cloudflare decides not to serve your hate platform.
So it seems in 2023 though nobody has to fear the bullet or the gulag, we've given various corporations so much power that their ability to "censor" is much more capable than ever in history, especially if they collude (which they often seemed forced to do). At least their collusion is much more predictable than the single communist party, whose legislation can drive the will of a single madman depending on their structure. The collusion of "big tech censorship" follows the predictable algorithm of capitalist profit seeking protection. You probably won't randomly get "censored" for criticizing a president's clothes or whatever in this environment.
So in the end though I think people are misusing the word "censor" in a way that diminishes what it means to be censored in the Soviet Union or the PRC, I do think there's a problem with how much power over what's able to be communicated publicly because of monopolization efforts and anti-interop and federalization efforts by large corporations. Don't mistake me for some kind of dude that wishes he could say the n word on Twitter though, my fears are justified by the punishment levied against people for posting pro-union rhetoric, or the doxxing to hostile governments of activists by platforms like Facebook or Twitter, or even just algorithms selectively choosing what people see, usually in favor of culture war rather than showing the reality of the world as a much more mundane place then tik tok would have you believe. This fear is similar to one I've always had about the ability to reach people on television being only available to multi billion dollar corporations.
The actual grim part: It's not an "eventually". Even if the censorship downranks and removes results I disagree with and makes me feel warm and fuzzy and enjoy that my political enemies are gnashing their teeth, it can very well rob me of information it'd be useful to know.
eg. to this day many people live under the impression that Kyle Rittenhouse shot three black people. If asked to estimate how many unarmed blacks get killed by police, Democrat voters give absolutely wild estimates when according to shooting databases the actual number is about 20 a year. According to a poll D voters thought you had a 50% chance of dying if you caught Covid, which is completely nuts even with the earlier, more dangerous strains.
Yet these people think they're well informed and follow the Science™.
If asked to estimate how many unarmed blacks get killed by police, Democrat voters give absolutely wild estimates when according to shooting databases the actual number is about 20 a year.
Uh, no.
By easily findable statistics, the number is more like 225+ a year - shot and killed. And is consistently disproportionate to the number of white victims.
What database are you using? The Washington Post records 12 unarmed black people shot in 2022, 11 in 2021, 18 in 2020, 12 in 2019, 22 in 2018. The 2023 tally thus far is at four. With no year filter, the total number of unarmed black victims is at 157 for the whole 2015-2023 period.
You know, if the conservatives ever come back to power, this precedent that we are creating on justifying censorship will bit us hard, and it will hurt as hell.
It's kind of complicated. The old labels of right and left, conservative vs progressives, and socialist vs capitalists are clearly inadequate nowadays.
Class struggle based left has all but disappeared in the West. And whatever your point of view on American involvement in Ukraine, it is clear that at least the mainstream branches of both parties are largely in accord.
Trump's belligerence on China (justified or not, I am not discussing this) has not only been embraced by the Democrats and NeverТrumpers on the Republican side, but also has been extended far beyond pure economic war, flirting now with proper kinetic war.
Environmental issues, once a solid socialist banner, now have been enthusiastically embraced by Wall Street (I suspect, unfortunately, for not-so-noble reasons beyond banks salivating at the prospect of financing the green transition, and entrepreneurs dreaming about all the opportunities on rebuilding our infrastructure and replacing the entire automobile fleet. Not that is bad in itself, capitalism needs constant growth to be viable, and green rebuilding allows this to happen for a few more decades without utterly destroying our planet).
Civil rights also have been solidly co-opted by the oligarchic class. Both for reasons that the moral behavior and values of the elites are fairly advanced and they want to impose their values as the mainstream values down the throats of the more backward working class and because it is useful as it redirects energy from unionization and other forms of class struggle.
All of our labels and categories simply don't work to understand this complex scenario.
ESG is an easy example of the kind of regulatory moat against competition that classical libertarian analysis routinely complains about.
> Civil rights also have been solidly co-opted by the oligarchic class. Both for reasons that the moral behavior and values of the elites are fairly advanced and they want to impose their values as the mainstream values down the throats of the more backward working class and because it is useful as it redirects energy from unionization and other forms of class struggle.
Worse than that - the elites actively hold luxury beliefs that cause damage at the lower rungs of society but the elites themselves don't quite behave by but which are useful to proclaim as signals of class allegiance and attaining status.
That said, it's been plainly shown that eg. the diversity push is in good part an anti-unionization ploy yet most of the left keeps supporting it.
Their cut of BAT tokens is probably pretty significant. The number of people I met who thought they were "beating" the system by paying Brave 30% of their ad revenue was surprisingly high. I wouldn't be surprised if that surpassed whatever funding DuckDuckGo is able to raise.
It's not two years. Brave Search is based on Tailcat, Cliqz's search engine technology that they kept building after Cliqz proper was shut down. Brave acquired the team and technology 2-3 years ago.
> In continuing our mission to offer alternatives to Big Tech, Brave is planning to release the Brave Search API. Through it, developers and companies will be able to build search experiences that compete on quality with Big Tech. Those interested should stay tuned for more details, or contact us at bizdev@brave.com.
That's going to be very important for search engines like phind which rely on the bing index service.
they have 200 employees on linkedin, many of whom are not engineers. How they can carry two such major and complicated projects(browser and search) with such headcount?
Can't say for search (it seems like massive work indeed - or maybe you can actually build a decent and comprehensive search engine with few people but with a massive amount of money), but for the browser they really provide a browser UI (and I'd guess most of it is actually built by Google too). It requires work, but it's not massive like a browser.
There are many browsers out there, maintained by a few devs, sometimes in their free time.
Konqueror, Gnome Web, qutebrowser, WebPositive...
Whatever the SerinityOS is doing, reimplementing a browser engine from scratch for their browser Ladybird [1], is vastly more impressive.
search.marginalia.nu consisted of 1 Swedish engineer and 1 server last I heard and still managed to outclass DDG in a number of query types relevant to me.
In fact, back when I used DDG I think I fell back to marginalia more often than I fell back to Google, partly because of my dislike for Google and partly because Google doesn't respect my queries - which of course is a contributing reason for my dislike for them.
Let's say 100 of the Brave employees are engineers and 50 of them work on the Chromium skin, that still leaves 50 to work on search and related efforts. If 5 of them are as good as the marginalia guy and they are allowed to work with equally clear direction, lack of interruptions and more funding, I think that could almost explain a working search engine.
Remember: In the first 20 years of Google existence (or in any 20 years of the semiconductor age until recently) Moores law had over 13 cycles. A lot of what used to be hard problems before isn't anynore.
> search.marginalia.nu consisted of 1 Swedish engineer and 1 server last I heard and still managed to outclass DDG in a number of query types relevant to me.
Still just 1 dinky lil' consumer hardware server in my living room. I think what is limiting the project the most is the hardware. Like I can definitely squeeze more out of it, but I could probably do 100 times more if I had any sort of operational budget.
But at least the development is funded for the moment. We'll see where I am when the NLnet money runs out...
Would having a few more people working on it make stuff move faster? Undeniably. But I don't think lack of manpower is an obstacle at the moment in the same lack of hardware. It's reasonable to expect there's an upper limit to how big a project you can manage as a single developer, but I don't think I'm there yet.
Right now I've got about two years runway, which isn't a lot but it also isn't nothing. Considering the project had barely started two years ago, and considering the opportunities it's already created, hopefully more options will make themselves available along the way somehow.
hopefully not the kind where you lose 90% of your forces, many to desertion and others to fighting with ethnic warlords, before finally defeating the encirclement campaign
Interesting question. If I wanted to say grow the index 10-fold and aim for a billion documents indexed (~2.5bn crawled), I'd need:
* More crawlers. This is mostly a network limitation. Disk requirement would be about 50 Tb in total of literally any hard drive, split along the crawlers.
* A dedicated number crunching machine for index construction and processing. Basically needs to be all cores and all RAM.
* A dedicated SQL server. Doesn't have to be super big or fast, but right now it's contending with the index for RAM.
* Either a bigger index server, or a few machines for a sharded index. I'd basically need 40 Tb worth of Enterpise SSD and 1 Tb total of RAM.
The problem space is very nice in that almost everything is either embarrassingly parallel along some axis or another or O(n)-O(n log n) so adding more hardware pays off well.
This is clearly too much hardware to run out of my apartment, even if the fuses held up the noise and heat would be intolerable, so likely some form of colocation hosting as well.
I dunno what it would land on. Probably a one-off cost of about $50k-$100k, depending the degree of redundancy. There's definitely stuff that could be done for less as well. Like right now the entire operation runs out of a single machine, and it's causing me to have to bring the service down for days at a time when I'm switching to a new index.
> Remember: In the first 20 years of Google existence (or in any 20 years of the semiconductor age until recently) Moores law had over 13 cycles. A lot of what used to be hard problems before isn't anynore.
The web also grow tremendously, and probably user expectations too (in the beginning of the century we were told in school not to speak to search engine like we would to a human, but with keywords and operators). We also do and search for many more kinds of things
If anything my expectations sunk massively between 2009 and the introduction of Kagi.
To be blunt: for me, mainstream search engines Google and Bing very much feel like the things they replaced, Altavista and Yahoo, just with some fancy bolt ons like maps etc.
I understand some people like to be able to write sentences to their search engines, but as long as the results have worse quality than they had 15 - 20 years ago, that "understanding" is just another fancy bolt on feature.
The only things that exist today that could threaten Google quality is Kagi which has gone all in on quality and ChatGPT (and other similar solutions) which finally have produced a working "answer machine" instead of breaking perfect or at least working search engines.
I love how on mobile Brave browser you can add YouTube videos to your Brave playlist and then play them while your screen is locked.
Also I switched from StartPage to Brave search, but I do wish Brave search had a translator feature. Like on StartPage I just search "translate" and get an input box. I find it better than most other browsers' translators.
Unrelated, but the same result is achievable by using Safari and 1Blocker for the people who don’t feel like installing another browser but are tempted by the mobile, ads free YouTube experience on iOS
btw: it’s also possible to go to fullscreen mode, then go directly to the home screen so that the pop-over player is activated, then the video keeps playing while the screen is looked, with controls working from the lockscreen.
Unrelated but you can also block ads with the FF mobile browser using ublock origin. I understand playing videos with screen locked is a big plus for brave though.
"Goggles enable any individual—or community of people—to alter the ranking of Brave Search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of the Brave search index."
That is really cool. It reminds me of I think it was in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell," by Neal Stephenson. The internet had been polluted with spam and fake information, and the future handled this by subscribing to "edit streams," or if they were rich enough having their own personal editor, who would tailor whatever content was out there to the person's tastes (and desire for truthiness, or, based on who they trusted as authoritative).
> “ However, note that if a Goggle is used only by one, or a very small number of people, the Goggle URL could serve as an identifier, and enable the creation of a profile of the user’s queries while using that particular Goggle.”
I use both. Brave is better for the "chromium only" wonky websites/webapps. But the whole altruistic privacy thing is kind of undercut, at least optics-wise, by all the crypto/gamification upsell present by default. Not good when your supposedly privacy-focused browser requires extensive fiddling in the settings to shut everything off on initial install a-la Windows 11...
Honestly its very easy to ignore all the crypto crap.
And its much better for your average user, since he/she will be private by just using brave, without any tinkering.
I would say defaults matter, and say a lot about priorities. I don't want to be judgmental about their funding model, but to have all of that turned on, after a fresh install, and in your face, by default...
They're everywhere by default. When I tried Brave out they had a wallet that popped up in the toolbar you seemingly can't uninstall, there's some sort crypto token reward thing (that you can't get rid of on mobile), on the new tab page there's sponsored crypto ads, and disabling this stuff, intentionally I suppose, is the only thing that does not sync so it always pops up on every new device.
Not since the early 2000s when browsers were infested with random toolbars have I seen so much shady spam in a web browser.
The crypto stuff is opt-in only, including on mobile. If you accidentally enabled it, you can disable it by clicking on the settings icon and going to 'Brave Rewards' and turning off 'Brave Private Ads.'
This comment was completely incongruous with my previous Brave experiences, so I went ahead and did a fresh install on a clean system.
* The wallet is enabled by default.
* The new tab page shows crypto ads by default. I couldn't figure out how to opt-out of these despite a couple of minutes in the "customize dashboard" menu. I know the option exists, but it's well-hidden.
* The BAT rewards icon is enabled by default, as well as the new tab card, as well as injected tip buttons on Github, Reddit, and Twitter.
* BAT rewards itself is not enabled by default, but there are no less than 3 distinct notifications asking me to enable it.
* Brave news is not enabled, but again there are multiple requests to enable it hidden throughout various menus. It's also not clear how Brave news interacts with Brave rewards. If I only enable news, do I still get the in-feed ads without the reward sharing, or is the news feed ad-free, or will only certain ad channels be shown?
So no, the crypto stuff is not opt-in. It's mostly opt-out with the BAT rewards program specifically being opt-in.
So your complaints seem to come down to 2 icons, and a what's shown on the new tab page. To disable icons, right click on them and select hide. To change what new tab pages show search for "new tab page shows" in the settings and change it to your homepage, or a blank page - as preferred.
Most people referring to the "crypto stuff" are talking about that program where you get an ad every once in a while and get some crypto for viewing it. I'm certainly not a fan of it, and would not use (let alone recommend) Brave, if it was imposed.
The Crypto shoehorn means I will never use Brave the browser, I'm just not interested in supporting the idea that every tiny action can be monetised. I use and support Fixefox for browsing.
Now I have no problem with their search engine if it is good. Alternatives are definitely needed. If they start pushing their token through it or weighing results based on the token in some way I might think again.
> * The new tab page shows crypto ads by default. I couldn't figure out how to opt-out of these despite a couple of minutes in the "customize dashboard" menu. I know the option exists, but it's well-hidden.
Customize->Background image. Has a total of two switches. One for background images at all, the other for sponsored background images. Turn the second one off.
So it's not part of the "dashboard" with all the other UI elements on the new tab page despite having its own HTML elements and the option is hidden in the seemingly unrelated background image menu? That certainly is well hidden.
What areyou even on about? There's a clear customize button on the new tab page, that has a clear background image customization. If you want to change it where else would you look?
The person I was responding to said it was "well hidden". It's literally one of a grand total of two toggles in the relevant settings screen, which is also the first one that opens if you click the customize button.
My experience has been the opposite. I wish Brave was more like Firefox.
I have Brave installed as an alternate browser (originally because sites like Twitch and Netflix performed poorly on Firefox, not so much the case anymore). And there's a noticeable lag when switching tabs that's absent in Firefox. And the memory usage - Brave uses as much memory with 10 tabs open as Firefox does with 100. It seems like "unloaded" tabs are not really unloaded at all, and continue to take up memory (which makes you question what unloading does) as long as the browser remains open.
I'm not sure what you mean by ergonomic, but I've been spoiled by Firefox's openness to customization, it was shocking to find that you can't even customize the toolbar on Brave to have your frequently used features handy.
You can always check the internal task manager to see which tabs/extensions/child-processes are using the most resources. To do so, visit › More Tools › Task Manager in the browser, or press Shift+Esc.
It was a movement that used the existing mechanism to promote a law they wanted, not a mob trying to get their way by shouting down others.
You may not like how the process works, but it works the same for everyone. Trying to smear the ones you don't agree with as not legitimate doesn't work, because it's the process that you're smearing.
I don't think this comment is internally consistent. I don't see any difference between "using the existing mechanism to promote a law" and "shouting down others to promote a law."
It sounds like your biggest priority in determining ethicality is legality: did anything illegal happen in the "cancellation" of the Brave founder? (I know nothing about this event, I'm just commenting within the context of this short conversation).
If not, how then are you determining one method being better than another?
> I don't think this comment is internally consistent. I don't see any difference between "using the existing mechanism to promote a law" and "shouting down others to promote a law."
If there is a legal and approved method for getting a law, why is forming a mob the same as using the official method?
Forming a mob is also called protesting, and many of the laws that define our society were written after popular protests.
I'm actually not even sure anymore what you mean by "legal and approved method for getting a law." Maybe you're talking about how some places like California have a process for petition > law proposition > law being put directly on the ballot? Not all states have that and as far as I know the usa congress has nothing like that. In fact when it comes to federal law the only way I'm aware of for citizens to get a law they want in the end always comes down to some kind of mob formation.
Anyway the meaning of the word "official" matters as well. The USA's founding documents state an intent that the authority of the government derives from the people. There's thus no difference between a government's rubber stamped "official process," and a crowd of people in city hall shouting.
Yes. Politics. Stuff that's irrelevant to the development of Firefox. Which is the only thing Mozilla should be focusing on given how far behind they are.
Perhaps people don’t like to support people actively working against their rights.
By using Firefox you support Mozilla, so you support the CEO financing political campaigns you don’t agree with. The CEO is a special role that represents Mozilla.
He was attacked for donating $1000 to a majority supported proposition 6 years before he became CEO. Not only that but he had made ensuring that his actions as CEO would be fair and inclusive a major cornerstone of everything he had planned [1]. That is a post made almost immediately after his appointment as CEO. Nonetheless he was forced out after less than 2 weeks.
> By using Firefox you support Mozilla, so you support the CEO financing political campaigns you don’t agree with.
I use Firefox because it's a functional browser with the best uBlock Origin support. Whatever political campaigns the guy in charge contributes to is not a factor, it's not even something I think about at all. I shouldn't even have to know who's in charge, if that information ever comes up it's probably a sign something's wrong.
> It’s simple, the guy had to go.
Mozilla is clearly worse off for it. Looks like the guy went and made another browser and now it's eating at Firefox's market share. Kind of ironic.
I do care -- about the impact this guy leaving had on Firefox. Given the state of Brave today, one's gotta wonder what Firefox would've been like today had he not left.
The company you work for perhaps. If you work for a company. Then it’s up to you. Most people don’t care but some do. You aren’t requested to check every CEO, no one said that.
You don't have to do anything lol. If you claimed to be progressive you might be called out for being hypocritical, but it's up to you whether that matters.
I do think choosing to live in a society does come with SOME social responsibilities though, don't you? Most we probably don't think about all that much, like not farting in public or whatever. Not scratching our crotches in public. Not cutting in lines. Stuff with no legal boundaries but are just general social responsibilities.
I really like Brave, and use it on mobile, but container tabs is still the killer Firefox feature for me on desktop. Hopefully one day Brave will get the equivalent.
The Mozilla CEO is to blame for the chaos they caused around Firefox, and them losing market share to Chrome for the past 14 years.
Mozilla is so dysfunctional that the CEO is rewarded a massive bonus for running the company to the ground and laying off their employees.
They are not interested in competing against Chrome; instead they are chronically dependent on Google's money and on life support, making over 80% of their revenue despite the Mozilla CEO saying that they would not fully depend on Google's money. in the future. [0]
I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.
> I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.
I get that you hate Mozilla, but from the perspective of an end user of browsers, this is a deeply irrational position. Less competition in the browser space is uniformly bad for end users, as we've seen very clearly in the past.
My dislike for Mozilla the non profit is rather intense but I still agree with you: nothing good comes out of playing into Googles hand here and shortening and simplifying the path they have to try to go to corner the browser market and become really problematic.
I still hope we can manage to break up Google before that happens so anything that delays Googles cornering of the browser market is a win in my eyes.
Note that competition in the browser space is different from competition in the engine space. Even then, Chromium remains open source, we already see things like Brave committing to not shipping the adblock-killing extension changes that Google is pushing.
As to Mozilla, their combination of incompetence, user-hostility, and complete dependence on Google renders them controlled opposition at best. They are not a serious player in the browser space, continuing to treat them like one is directing limited resources and mind share into a failing enterprise.
This ignores the fact that Google is the/a dominant player in at least mail, search, ads, and mobile. That both funds Google's browser and they can nag users to switch.
It's more surprising that Mozilla survives at all (and likely at Google's mercy with default placement payment) since the only other browsers who can hope to compete have massive subsidies from a larger business.
> Firefox competed against fairly successfully against Microsoft for a decade.
My recollection was that Microsoft had stopped innovating on IE6 almost entirely during that decade, right? Or at least for the few years that enabled Firefox to get a foothold.
> They still spin off massive amounts of cash -- they just piss it away on their foundation, and not improving the product.
Hard agree on this. So many side quests when the main quest is not done.
No they didn't. Microsoft was just asleep at the wheel. The difference between an incumbent who doesn't care (MS) and an upstart that cares (Google) is easily visible by how rapidly IE market share crashed after Firefox arrived -- and then later, how FF crashed as Chrome grew.
Firefox usage is abysmal on Desktop (from the Cloudflare usage stats which doesn't depend on JavaScript being enabled) and practically inexistent on mobile. My tech friends gave up, and normal users just use the defaults: Edge (which is good enough for them), Safari or whatever browser default browser comes with their smartphone. Mozilla needs to figure out how to attract new users, and focus.
Having stopped Firefox users from browsing the net with infinite verification loops, Cloudflare finds their unbiased estimation of internet browser usage shows Firefox is in decline.
4% share according to our Google Analytics (higher education). Of course, FF users might be more likely to run an adblocker that blocks GA, but either way it's a pretty dire figure.
It seems we're all relying on Apple/Safari to provide that Chromium alternative.
Have they sorted out the bookmark syncing? When I tried Brave a few years ago I went back to Chrome (and now FF) as the bookmark syncing functionality would frequently go out of sync for hours on different browser installs.
It is ergonomic until you want to send more than one tab using Brave sync.
Also Ctrl + B to show the bookmarks sidebar would be nice, for those of us who nest their web clippings deeply.
On the iOS app, it also forgets usernames I’ve stored using password sync. For some sites (criteria unclear) I have to type the username before it inserts the password, which is frustrating to a privacy conscious user who will not use the same email address everywhere.
I want to like it but there are power user pleasing areas where it certainly lags behind Firefox.
In Brave, you can select the Bookmarks panel from the side bar, and then toggle it open/closed from then on with Ctrl+B.
Regarding iOS, it's entirely possible there's a bug in our code. I'll definitely take a closer look and speak with the team regarding this report. That said, it's also not entirely uncommon for users to enter a site through a slightly different URL, or form, which complicates the credential-autofill logic. If you have an example or two of sites where this behavior is consistently observed, that would be much appreciated.
Ah, tried Ctrl+B with the mini side bar already open and found it works. Thanks.
The two recent culprits that didn't toggle password autofill were eBay.co.uk and Gumtree.co.uk. I'd be grateful it if this could be investigated; the latter prevented me from checking an address in the Gumtree PMs whilst on the road delivering a purchase.
On the issue of sending multiple tabs, it is frustrating enough that it prevents me from adopting Brave as my main browser. I often open a few sites that interest me on mobile then decide to read more on my desktop. If you could pass the word along for someone to investigate that, all the better.
With that said, it's commendable being the only browser on iOS with first class advert blocking & sync with every other platform.
I used Vivaldi for a good year or two on my machines, but after some point Vivaldi was so slow to launch and to navigate. Maybe it was my setup, but other browsers were quick launch and use. Been using FF for several months now, maybe they fixed the issues in Vivaldi since.
Vivaldi has this issue with many tabs slowing down the whole UI, but the new v6 feature of workspaces allows you to move some tabs to a WS group, that improves UI performance
Brave's blockers are better, the browser performs better, and I like the native Chromium tab groups more than Vivaldi's tab stacks. Brave also had background media playback on mobile long before Vivaldi, who only got it in the latest update.
Vivaldi's fine, and it's what I'd use if Brave didn't exist, but I just like the experience of using Brave more, especially on desktop. Vivaldi's new mobile version, from what I've seen, has clarified their old mobile UI a lot and got background media playback, so that's less of an issue.
I've set Brave Search to be my default search engine for private windows (incognito mode). I've grown annoyed by the cookie consent dialogs and captchas that are presented to me by Google when I open Google's search engine in a private window. Brave Search doesn't have those annoyances.
It's been my default search for months. I go to Google for images and maps, but Brave search serves most of my needs quite well.
But throwing a monkey wrench into the whole thing is my increasing use of Bing Chat. It's not really a general purpose search replacement, but it does do a more efficient job of answering basic questions succinctly.
Surprisingly good. I tried "what is a monad" and got reasonable results. Searching my own name resulted in socials instead of my personal website, but that seems reasonable since my personal website isn't super popular. I guess I'll have to try it out for a few days or even weeks to really know, but a completely new search engine would be amazing.
I first used Firefox when it was Phoenix, back in 2002. You downloaded a zip file, extracted it and ran it.
For the next 20 years I used Firefox. But I could feel the performance difference from Chromium browsers.
I finally threw in the towel and switched to Brave out of the collection of them now. I hated switching because it meant yet another user lost to one of the remaining handful of unique engines for browsing the web. I like competition and standards, and the more the better with browsing engines. Even if it may bring developers some pain.
I've been very happy with it. People gripe about ads, crypto integration, etc. but it can all be avoided and/or turned off. It has the speed of Chromium but with additional features and is privacy-focused.
But to get to the point, regarding the search ...
I'm happy to see they (somehow!) have been able to build their own search engine now. Obviously that's no simple task, I have no idea what goes into powering that but it has to be a major investment.
It seems pretty good. If they can sell API access for cheaper then the others and still return quality results, that seems like it has potential to be a good revenue stream.
They are very clear about the Web Discovery Project, what the purpose is, what it collects, etc. And obviously it's opt-in.
I really hope they succeed with this. Another example of where competition is definitely good.
This story feels a bit weird to me because I went back to Firefox 2-3 years ago for performance reasons, haha.
I felt like Chrome was using all my battery and memory on my previous MBP. I gave Firefox a trial run and never came back.
I haven't really tried chromium based browser since I came back to Linux
Used Firefox from long ago, but switched about 3 years ago when I just was getting way too many problems with firefox not running SaaS stuff. Couldn't run Salesforce on Firefox. Maybe there was some way that someone knows of here, but I didn't and was not going to spend 200 hours trying to find out. So after extensive decision-making process of looking at everything, I chose Brave.
i tried, but I was immediately put off by the inability to search for an exact string. To me, that makes a search engine useless. Am i missing something? I tried using quotes etc, but the results always force up approximate matches.
While they did some shady stuff with their browser in the past, the search engine is surprisingly good and their relation with the community is pretty decent, I wish more search providers start providing their own results instead of using Bing API.
Sadly it failed my test. When I search for "Python str split" it includes trash results and midway down the first page of results is the python API documentation after some YouTube videos, W3Schools and "GeeksForGeeks" spam garbage. DuckDuckGo at least has the results correct for this case and an infocard on the side that understands it's a Python related API question with relevant examples and links.
Read the announcement and it looks like there isn't an option to submit a site for crawling. If that's true, how do they discover new sites? My understanding of the 'the Web Discovery project' is that they're indexing your search and the results you click, anonymously but you won't see new sites in your search results which in turn means the new site won't be indexed by them
If you turn on "the Web Discovery Project" in the Brave browser, then a fraction of the web addresses you visit will be sent to Brave, even if the web pages weren't from a Brave Search SERP.
> If you opt-in to the Web Discovery Project, your browser will process the following data on your device, and securely send it to Brave’s servers:
> - A fraction of the addresses (URLs) of the web pages visited in the Brave Browser, along with engagement metrics (how much time is spent on the page)
Probably watching for new DNS entries gets you most of the way there. When you fire up any new website you usually get a pile of visits from mysterious cloud boxes in the first 24 hours before you are listed on any search engine. I assume that's how they find you.
How does one watch for new DNS entries? I was under the assumption that iterating the contents of a DNS zone isn't desirable now so is usually disabled/deprecated.
Not a DNS expert but I believe you can get regularly updated copies of zone files from ICANN. To get domains not under their observation I expect you can go out and make deals with registrars on an individual basis. For an individual or small organisation, probably easier would be to subscribe to an API that does it.
Good because I've about had it with DuckDuckGo. Bing has downmodded a ton of Wikipedia (probably to trick people into using their stupid AI). Feeling trapped with both Google and Bing being terrible.
I've been using brave search since it became public and it was known they bought tailcat.
Have been very happy with the search results, and for people who don't like the simpler programming tutorial sites you can even make a custom "goggle" to block those from the results completely.
I would really like to move away from google search, but unfortunately every other engine I tried sucks for localized searching...
I get it that I come from small central europe country which is not that interesting market wise but it looks like google is able to provide relevant results while any other engine does not.
For example I tried brave to search for watch I'm currently considering buying. When using site:sk it gives me 3 results... Same google search returns thousands results...
Suggestion: use Brave Search as default, and g! for localized queries. I did that with DDG and for a while with Brave Search, but now it's surprisingly good enough even for my country.
I tried it, and honestly it sucks, all the rankings are terrible, I searched stackoverflow and I got seo spam as one of the top results, the title or meta didn't even include "stackoverflow".
We're always on the look-out to improve our search ranking. Would you be able to share some of the queries you made that did not return satisfying results? (or use in-page feedback to report them automatically to us). It would be very useful.
To be fair, Google has product teams which has custom built components for different search verticals. I wouldn't expect this of a small search company.
I have been using Brave Search for a year now. It has been great. It provides relevant results and I love how Brave AI floats a summarizer to the top with cited and hyperlinked material when applicable.
Very rarely I will need to hit the Find Elsewhere 'Google' button. This is usually done for niche technical searches where Google prioritizes some forums dedicated to the topic like Reddit or Stack Overflow. I _could_ re-search with the site operator, but after scrolling down with the Google escape hatch there, the flow just seems more natural.
Just as an aside, I have also been experimenting with SearX searches. The experience isn't as streamlined as Brave Search, but I can incorporate Brave Search into my results. I find the value proposition interesting for SearX, but implementation still lacking.
I know brave is basically chrome but i am very pleased with the experience. Works a charm on linux and is good enough at blocking ads that i dont really need pihole. The only thing i miss is syncing between devices, i mess that up and cant get it right. All in all is quite good.
Great to have alternative entry points into the web.
DDG seem to do quite well in that a lot of their users will deem the relevance good enough, perhaps not aware of its 100% reliance on Bing. More often than not new search engine skins with comparable results to Google and Bing do tend to be the actual results of Google and Bing. Apparently the average searcher doesn't know nor care.
If everyone 'donated' at least a few searches a day to true alternative engines, it'd help diversify search, surely. The fact that Google has such a high amount of revenue per search has helped them price out competitors e.g. being defaults on browsers and devices. Can see why Brave would launch a browser to assist/complement search.
I love brave browser and have been using it for over a year now, but I find brave search to be visually unappealing. It seems very squished up to the left and small, I wish they would let it breath a little more.
as a brave user on my personal devices its nice to see that theyre continually working towards independence. brave browser with brave search has worked fine for me, i barely notice the difference having switched from chrome/google.
I have a love-hate relationship with Brave search. I love the browser, but the first thing I do (after disabling the crypto stuff) is change the search to Google. I’m tempted to change it to ChatGPT.
For searching every day things, brave search is great. For searching technical things, such as scientific articles or programming errors, the results are not just badly ordered - they’re often missing entirely.
At least, that’s how it was the last time I used it, which was admittedly about a year ago. If things have changed, let me know.
Browser: Shows sponsored images along with pretty wallpapers on the new tab page (opt-out, one toggle to turn off, can turn off ads and leave Brave-sourced pretty images in). Users can opt in to Brave Rewards which shows them ads as toaster popups (how many is the user's choice), and users get a cut of the ad revenue as BAT.
Brave Rewards tipping service: Show users the toaster popups. Brave takes a cut when users tip creators or websites with the built-in tipping system.
Brave News: Funded by users having Brave Rewards ads enabled.
Brave Talk: Traditional subscription service.
Brave Search: Keyword-based ads, a traditional subscription for ad-free search.
Different thing. That's their Brave Rewards thing, which shows you ads (your choice how often) as toaster popups and gets you a part of the revenue as BAT (which can be used to support creators with Brave's tipping service).
The search engine itself shows keyword based ads on search results pages, and Brave offers a $3/mo subscription for ad-free search.
Is there search independent? They have no page talking about their robot. The Cliqz index they acquired was a database of query url pairs scraped from Google. It is not obvious how true their claims of independence are or how they are building an index beyond further scraping of Google and opaque Brave browser add-ons
I have brave search as default but always do a google bang “!g”. I do this for every search but figure I’m giving brave some data on all my searches to help improve it. I guess it’s be better if I clicked a link on their results too for reinforcement learning.
He wants to show Brave the queries so they can improve their index without suffering worse results while Brave's index is lagging behind for his purposes.
I'm not sure if I will add it to my searx instance. The problem is that Brave gets more shady over time(shady BAT "donations" to creators, Brave VPN, ads on the homepage, and the let's not forget the crypto).
Brave's search has always been pretty lacking, at least for me. I've found myself having to use Yandex to fill the gaps, especially whenever I search for something old.
I wonder how will they monetize Brave Search. It's good that there are sensible alternatives to Google, and I would like them to succeed and be able to provide the service in the future.
Very good search engine. Default on all my devices. Better than Bing (and DDG which runs on it). Results were so decent, that I was suspecting that they were scraping Google.
<meta property="og:description" content="Search the web privately ...">
Would be nice if Brave did not require SNI since this is considered a privacy concern by some folks.^1 Anyone sniffing the wire can see all the domain names to which the SNI user is connecting.^3 The other search engines do not require SNI, e.g., Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, GigaBlast, Qwant, etc.
1. One example would be Cloudflare. Because some folks see SNI as a privacy concern, Cloudflare used to offer ESNI which was a way to encrypt SNI. It has since been discontinued while we wait for ECH. Some HN commenters will often try to argue that SNI is irrelevant to users without offering any evidence to support. Watch for it. For example, China found SNI was relevant enough to block ESNI. Apparently, China found it preferable to use SNI than to use only IP addresses, which of course are easy for websites to change. Go figure.
SNI can be used for censorship purposes, among other things. Many search engines work without SNI. But not Brave.
NB. As I understand it, these browsers do not allow the user to enable/disable SNI on a per site basis; in some of them it is not even possible to disable SNI at all.^2 TLS might enable the user to hide web pages from the proverbial "MITM", but with SNI enabled it will not allow them to hide web sites.
2. Thus, even when Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, GigaBlast, Qwant, Mojeek, etc., and millions of other websites do not require the user to send SNI in order to return SERPs or other pages, these browsers send it anyway. Brilliant.
3. SNI is different than DNS. DNS lookups can be done at a different time from when a user connects, if the user ever does connect. (Popular browsers are not good for this, of course.) Unlike DNS, SNI proves the user actually connected. Strangely, much effort has gone into encrypting DNS, while SNI, and to some extent TLS prior to version 1.3, leaks these same domain names on the wire, unencrypted.
If you can choose not to require SNI, doesn't that mean that your domain is the only one being served by the IP it's on, and that the IP address (also visible to anyone sniffing the wire) then reveals the exact same information as SNI would have?
Not necessarily. For example, if I access 142.250.187.228 what domain name was in the Host header. Hint: It's not www.google.com. If I visit 65.9.141.10, then what domain was in the Host header. Hint: It's not search.brave.com.
But do not take a random HN commenter's word for it. Try this yourself. Try to map IP addresses to domain names on a very large sample. I have tested this on hundreds of thousands of domains. It will not work reliably. Not even close. Compared to SNI, which is both simple and reliable, it is a total PITA.
If this 1-to-1 IP to domain mapping and 100% reliable reverse DNS idea made any sense, then why claim encrypted DNS offers "DNS privacy". Anyone can see IP addresses on the wire. If all IP addresses can easily be mapped to domain names, then how would this provide any privacy.
Mapping IP addresses to domain names has to account for the fact that IP addresses can change. To make sure the mapping is correct one has to constantly keep doing lookups. SNI stays the same even if the IP changes. It requires very little effort; it makes the process of determining the domain name trivial.
The goal is not total privacy. (Impossible when using the internet anyway.) The goal is to not to make surveillance easy. That's what SNI does. It makes surveillance (and censorship) super easy.
If I am wrong about this, and SNI is AOK, then why was ESNi developed and why is ECH being developed. It is not an easy problem to solve. Why bother. SNI was a feature to benefit websites, not website users. It has some very undesirable properties for users.
Even with CDNs that need to use SNI, it is still possible to avoid sending the domain name in plaintext on the wire. One can use a dummy name, i.e., not the name in the Host header, as the SNI and the CDN can still return the correct page because it uses only the Host header. This was nicknamed "domain fronting". I was using this technique before anyone started calling it that. Using a dummy name can reduce the surveillance value of SNI, sometimes to zero. After some "security researchers" started bragging about their discovery of "domain fronting", AWS and other CDNs started checking SNI against Host header to make sure they are the same. Now "domain fronting" no longer works. Countries that censor the internet, who are valued AWS customers, rely on accurate SNI in order to carry out censorship. Go figure.
I don't care if people disagree with me, and I wouldn't have anything against him if he was just personally bigoted and wrote about how much he hates gay people on his blog or something.
I don't think people should be canceled for expressing opinions, but that's not the same as funding an effort to actively harm people. He is entitled to his opinions, but he is not entitled to enforce them on other people.
People have opinions and inevitably their offspring usually adopt their opinions. There will be exceptions obviously but exceptions make the rule. For the most part that is probably how society changes over time. A high birthrate of Amish compared to the rest of the population could completely change the political landscape.
Anyway, there isn't any proof that Eich hates gay people in the way you imply. He didn't lead any anti-LGBT changes at Mozilla and there haven't been any at Brave. The commentary is that he did one thing that really offended a bunch of people. There just aren't compelling reasons to think he's a monster.
> he is not entitled to enforce them on other people
In 2008 when Proposition 8 was on the ballot, that Eich privately supported, even President Obama (candidate at the time) was publicly against gay marriage.
There needs to be some historical cultural context, supporting Prop 8 in 2008 is different than supporting Prop 8 in 2023. Now if Eich said he would support it in 2023, that's a different matter.
But I would still use Brave browser and search since it's a good product.
I don't think there need to be any historical cultural context. It was just as wrong and bigoted then as now. It's not an excuse that most people agreed with him at the time.
If I accepted that agreeing with the majority makes everything okay, I couldn't criticize the many horridly immoral things the majority still agree with today.
I still use Brave sometimes, and I would probably still use it if he did the same thing today, but I will continue to think he is a bad person unless he at least donates the same amount (adjusted for inflation) to a charity that supports LGBTQ+ people.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with choosing products and services that don't align with your views either. Just look at conservatives trying to cancel budweiser & disney.
I wasn't aware of Ein's outspoken and proactive homophobia, so this is still news to some.
Wanting to avoid tedious repetitive flamewars, of the sort that destroy an internet forum, is hardly to favor Hitler.
Internet forums have a strong default tendency to burn themselves to a crisp. The idea of HN, for 15+ years now, has been to try to stave that outcome off as long as possible.
(For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.)
Brave gets it right. Bing, Google and even DuckDuckGo do not.