Cancelled Tech Genius Behind Brave Preps the First New Search Engine

[PeteS in CA]

Cancelled Tech Genius Behind Brave Preps the First New Search Engine

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/cancelled-tech-genius-behind-brave-preps-first-new-daniel-greenfield/

You may remember Brendan Eich. He was the brilliant mind behind JavaScript who co-founded Mozilla, and then was forced out as an early victim of cancel culture over his religious views on traditional marriage.
...
But Eich rebounded with Brave, a privacy-oriented browser. That's not a unique idea, most alternative browsers to Google's Chrome and whatever Microsoft is calling its browser this week, claim to offer privacy.

But Brave recently had a gamechanger by way of integrating IFPS.

IFPS is potentially a huge deal in an internet that is centralized around a handful of Big Tech monopolies because it moves from a vertical model to a horizontal one, in which sites are loaded from other internet users. Think of it as Torrent for internet browsing. And that will make it much harder to take those sites down.

Now Brave is announcing a new search engine.
...
But Brave is touting not just a front for Bing results, but an actual index. That's potentially huge.

“Under the hood, nearly all of today’s search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies. In contrast, the Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect but without compromising their privacy,” Brave writes in a press release announcing the acquisition.

The former Cliqz dev team, who had subsequently been working on Tailcat, are moving to Brave as part of the acquisition. The engineering team is led by Dr Josep M Pujol — who is quoted in Brave’s PR saying it’s “excited to be working on the only real private search/browser alternative to Big Tech”.

What Mozilla did to Eich is the reason I refuse to use Firefox and Mozilla's captive spun-off, Waterfox. A better alternative to BingDuck BingDuck Go would be welcome

[Elderberry]

Its hard for me to let go of the past. I still use Firefox ESR and Thunderbird on my PC, but I have been using Brave on my cell phones for years. I'm definitely going to check this Search Engine out.

[roamer_1]

Its hard for me to let go of the past. I still use Firefox ESR and Thunderbird on my PC, but I have been using Brave on my cell phones for years. I'm definitely going to check this Search Engine out.

I have avoided Brave... Anything built on Chromium is too close to Google... And addons are all from the google playstore.

NOPE.

I will stay in Firefox - which is now the only independent non-Chrome browser code base out there. At least the only one I know of, with full sync and share, etc.

And I do fine with FF on mobile too.

I have moved on from thunderbird though.

[BassWrangler]

Nice to have another option, but I'm skeptical he can pull it off. Building an internet scale search engine is a huge undertaking. You can build an index on what is called the"head" and show results from the most popular web sites, but to cover what's called the "tail" requires many tens of thousands of servers. To show results with good relevancy requires hard work on algorithms and lots of data science. To show results with the awesome low latency that Bing and Google provide requires even more engineering, expensive infrastructure such as edge networks, and (again) many tens of thousands of servers. To make money on it with ads is also very challenging.

And I am an engineer that worked for a number of years on one of the two major search engines, so I'm not pulling this out of my kiester.

All that said, I wish him success. More choices is better.

[roamer_1]

Nice to have another option, but I'm skeptical he can pull it off. Building an internet scale search engine is a huge undertaking. You can build an index on what is called the"head" and show results from the most popular web sites, but to cover what's called the "tail" requires many tens of thousands of servers. To show results with good relevancy requires hard work on algorithms and lots of data science. To show results with the awesome low latency that Bing and Google provide requires even more engineering, expensive infrastructure such as edge networks, and (again) many tens of thousands of servers. To make money on it with ads is also very challenging.

And I am an engineer that worked for a number of years on one of the two major search engines, so I'm not pulling this out of my kiester.

All that said, I wish him success. More choices is better.

I have had a great time with Yippy, which uses IBM Watson... If somebody could create better performance, I would stay on Yippy... But alas... It is too slow. 

So I am back to StartPage and scraping Google. The returns are no where near as good, but sufficient, normally, and quick.

[Elderberry]

I switched to using StartPage and after using it for around a month it started, occasionally, popping up windows;"Prove to us you ain't a robot".  Then it got so bad those windows popped up over an over an over. So I quit using it.

[roamer_1]

I switched to using StartPage and after using it for around a month it started, occasionally, popping up windows;"Prove to us you ain't a robot".  Then it got so bad those windows popped up over an over an over. So I quit using it.

That has never happened to me at all.   

[Elderberry]

I guess my identity is too hidden to suite them.

[roamer_1]

I guess my identity is too hidden to suite them.

I know how to do that too. Never had it happen even once. Maybe ScriptBlocker or UBlock Origin... But that's really all I have running on FF, onioning, VPN, or not...