Here's the source code for a sample "Hacker News" Goggle. Essentially, it will prioritize domains popular on Hacker News. I could even see a browser plugin that lets you add or remove domains as you visit them.
Our brains are not well-equipped to down-rank bad information sufficiently once we are exposed to it. By then, it’s often too late. We do have powers of planning and selective exposure though, so we can say “I think these newspapers are authoritative and these others aren’t, so that’s what I’m going to subscribe to” much easier than “I’m going to selectively ignore this trash information that I see in google results or my Facebook wall.” Tools like this will allow reasonable people to curate the most authoritative sources on their side of the ideological spectrum. So even a right-leaning lens will tend to exclude the most extreme sources, and this will ease pressure on Fox such that it can present more center-right content without losing views. Same with the left-leaning lenses and MSNBC. If this idea proliferates (of selective exposure in a digital environment, where algorithms don’t entirely choose what you see), it can help deflate the network effects of extremism and populism in a virtuous cycle.
You can use keywords to select search engines in both Chrome and Firefox. If you configure "custom1" as a keyword, then just type custom1 followed by a space into the address bar it will activate that search engine and send the rest of your query to that URL.
This wouldn't let you use multiple "flavors" of Brave though unless they expose different URLs for 'Goggles'; sounds like you just are allowed to enable one as a sitewide setting.
They do have different URLs for different goggles. Do a search for the word "test" with a Goggle on, then grab the URL from the address bar and paste that into your new bookmark. Replace "test" with "%s", add a keyword, and you're good to go. Repeat with other goggles.
This is not so innovative, you've been able to do so for many years using Google Custom Search (now Programmable Search Engine) - e.g. many years ago I made an open source projects search: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=008818486088109706548:xnogqdia...
The syntax makes me wonder if the implementation is related to their high-performance filter rule evaluation library, adblock-rust [0]. Whatever is doing the dynamic reranking would need to evaluate lots of rules and churn through links fast.
This is one of the first things I did when I implemented my own Bing proxy, although I did the site boosting/downranking/exclusions and rewrote URLs (e.g. www.reddit.com > old.reddit.com) myself since I didn't have any users, but the plans was always to give users the ability to control this.
> Modify the results content (other than to reformat them in a way that does not violate any other requirement), unless required by law or agreed to by Microsoft.
> Reorder, including by omission, the results displayed in an answer when an order or ranking is provided, unless required by law or agreed to by Microsoft.
> Display content that was not included within any part of a response in a way that would lead a user to believe that content is part of the response.
And there are many other restrictions imposed upon you. I'd argue the reason you see almost zero innovation in this space (the only thing I can think of is !bangs) is because non-Google/Bing(/Brave) Search Engines have very little control over the received data, and with the little control we do have then there are many restrictions that prevents us from making these 'innovative' features.
Based on my pessimistic reading then we're not allowed under any circumstances to merge API results from multiple search engines (e.g. Bing + Yandex + Google), and for every site we want to exclude/boost/derank/rewrite sites/urls then we need explicit permission from a Microsoft representative (which would prevent us from implementing this kind of feature). We're also not allowed to display third-party ads on any pages that displays part of the API results (which is funny because I feel it's near impossible to join Microsoft's Advertising network even though my site in my opinion have a good purpose and provide a high quality UI/UX experience - https://ask.moe).. I've later switched to Google's Programmable Search Engine and even though my site has been approved by Google as a non-profit, as well as approved for AdSense, then they will only display ads in the search results if I turn off revenue-share.
This industry desperately needs legislation that makes it possible for everybody to obtain access to Google/Microsoft's crawled data, and this access should not be limited to expensive APIs that make it impossible for anybody besides Google/Microsoft to do any sort of innovation.
Surely big partners like DuckDuckGo have negotiated their own terms with MS. DDG certainly combines Bing's results with other sources, at least they claim to.
I hope Goggles can be used as a ranking signal to help default search engine deliver better results.
Google has never had the appetite for letting users explicitly improve its results. Their reasoning was that pure algorithm is the only possible solution that scales. Even the minor features, such as "I never want to see this site", were removed.
I am glad Brave is trying out something different. Crossing my fingers that it works, the current state of search is so meh..
I hope forums gain some weight after google decided to f** them over in the results. IDK in English but for spanish language forums are still valuable, but you need to know the domain name so that hurts discoverability.
I just used Brave for the first time and was absolutely delighted to see they have a dedicated "discussions" section when you search for something. It's literally what has sold me to trying it as my default engine for a few weeks.
I want this but can’t find it. I want to find discussions on something (toyota sienna) but when I search I don’t see any discussions section. Even putting “discussions” in the search terms does not bring it up. Looks like something they should make toggleable.
EDIT: I take this back. If I put the term “discussion” in the search along with “toyota sienna”, I see a “discussions” section in the search results if I am on the “goggles” tab. I don’t see the discussions section if I omit the “discussion” term though.
It's not a tab, it's a section of the default search results page. And it also is just Reddit. At least for the couple of searches I just tried it for.
> I hope Goggles can be used as a ranking signal to help default search engine deliver better results.
Ranking is already treated as predicting which of the search matches the user is most likely to want to see. Clickbait gets highly ranked because users do in fact click on it. Goggles (which sound like a great idea) apparently let you somewhat control the prior probability distribution as an input to the ranking algorithm.
I wonder what features it lets you select on. E.g. we had a thread here recently about finding useful product reviews. It would be great to have a goggle that downranks any site containing amazon affiliate links, since those are almost always basically shill sites despite being "reviews".
Yes there are some exceptions. Maybe I should have said "most of" instead of "almost all", but the thing is that it's common and frequent enough that I want to bypass that style of "review".
Seriously how hard must be to flag duplicated content from GitHub, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow? Seriously, last week I had a query that returned the exact same content three times on the same page: the first result was a GH issue, and the other two were spam websites with the same content from GH. Google used to be good at flagging and downranking duplicated content, but now they don't even care, it's a shame.
I'm always amazed at such comments that trivialise the challenges of fighting spam and SEO while being the most dominant search engine by far (which means spam and SEO targets you by far).
If it is so easy, why don't you build a dominant search engine that manages to complete avoid the "totally easy" spam you talk about?
If perhaps, you have extensive experience in the anti-spam section of a dominant search engine (or some similar position), I'd give your comment more weight. Do you have such experience?
What exactly is difficult about detecting direct copies of just those three sites? Because that's what's out there: exact copies. If Google isn't filtering those out, it's because they don't want to.
Google Search is most likely an incredibly complex engineering feat with many moving parts.
Unless you provide me with your qualifications and/or previous experience that would lend credence to your claim, I will view your claim as one from an armchair critic/engineer.
They used to be good at it, now they seem bad. How can that be? How hard is to not show three exact copies of the same result for the same query on the first page?
And yes, I'm being "an armchair critic/engineer", like everyone else criticizing Google or any other big company that seems to be getting worse at what they excelled.
To be clear, I am not labeling your commentary armchair criticism because you are supposing that spam on Google is more prevalent in recent times, but because you are so confidently asserting that it is easy to fight spam at the scale and quality Google is operating at.
Since you haven't provided any qualifications/past experience, I am not convinced at all that it's as easy as you say it is.
The only constant in my journey in comp sci is my underestimation of how much time and effort things take, so I guess I may be trying to compensate for that.
Incidentally, if anyone has insight into how to improve that aspect of my job, that would be much appreciated!
Google has problem with generated "marketing" sites whose content gets filled by bots. They also use the latest SEO tricks to get ahead. This is something any small private internet presence will never have while click-farms will.
Additionally we hide information behind proprietary platforms like Discord that cannot be crawled.
Ironically Googles research of text AI undermines their search algorithm because now spammers use said AIs to get good page ratings. A lot of sites have ever the same content with a few different words here and there. Especially new media content get immediately swamped with such sites since there are no established sites under certain key words. A domain filter sadly won't work as well since there a so many scamming sites.
I feel like Google would do better by letting users register filters. For example I'd filter out ranker, vulture, and similar sites. That would seem like more signal for Google than not having that user preference. More signal = better searches = more searches = more money.
Yea I’ve been waiting for this. Feels like the biggest innovation in search in a long time . Can’t wait till the community builds a goggle to remove all built for SEO sites
How many times does this need to be corrected... Brave never injected their own affiliate codes into anything. They had sponsored results when searching in the URL bar just like Mozilla is doing now in Firefox (as of v93) with 'Firefox Suggest'. When people complained, the Brave team turned it off by default and made it so users couldn't tab-to-complete to a sponsored result which was never the intention in the first place.
>Brave never injected their own affiliate codes into anything.
Coinbase, the founder of Monero, and other experts disagree.
Firefox does not opt-in their users to inserting Firefox's own affiliate codes to coinbase, binance, or other crypto websites to get paid for traffic the way Brave did.
The 'experts' you cite with names (one of which is a known fraudster) and without sources are wrong then? An off the cuff twitter comment is not an analysis, just false conjecture like you are participating in now.
How is what Brave did any different than what firefox currently DOES?
Again, Firefox does not inject affiliate codes into URLs to get paid for referral traffic. I'm beginning to begin you have confirmation bias as a Brave apologist.
I can't address it if you refuse to provide a source to it (because it doesn't exist I suspect). You keep giving names with no sources even when you reply to a comment asking for such an analysis source.
I'll state again... what Firefox is DOING is the same exact thing as Brave did. Now sure how else I can state that. It is right in the Firefox Suggest FAQs.
> Firefox does not opt-in their users to inserting Firefox's own affiliate codes
they opt users into telemetry and “experiments” instead, and the entire business is almost entirely kept alive with funding from Google, despite claims to care about privacy.
All significantly worse issues compared to adding affiliate links to a few sites. Affiliate links don’t pay for traffic, they pay for new user acquisition or sales. It’s no different than sponsored tabs / cards in Mozilla today.
Again, opting in telemetry tracking is not injecting your affiliate codes to get paid for traffic you send as a browser.
It's fascinating the loops that people are going through (it doesn't exist, if does exist it's not that bad, poisoning the well, etc.) to apologize for this scummy behavior by Brave.
For a bit of historic accuracy if it ever matters for future readers:
Kagi was founded in 2019 and we have operated for years in private beta with thousands of users before public beta release this June.
Goggles were not inspired by Kagi”s lenses and I can confirm seeing the whitepaper before we got the lens feature out last year.
Kagi”s Lenses were inspired by Blekko’s “slashtags” which is probably the original “prior art” for this kind of feature.
Looks like we arrived to similar idea, but different execution. Kagi”s Lens feature is osimple to create filter for the web, that anyone can make with a few clicks plus a bunch of powerful built-in lenses like “noncommercial” or “discussions” search.
We applaud all these innovations and are glad to see what is being done with Kagi Lenses and Brave Goggles. The Web ecosystem and users need innovations in search.
We are currently bringing this back (in Beta). RollYo innovated too (private Beta August 2005). Google Custom Search launched in October 2006. So there were at least 3 services that predate Blekko (2010).
I'm a paying Kagi user because doublequotes works, i.e. if I search for something using doublequotes around it, Kagi actually makes sure those words are in the page, and if it fails they create a bug report and fix it.
It seems to be better in every other way too, but that is actually the single reason why I pay for it.
That is what I corrected, assuming you meant we were announced to the public in 2022.
Kagi was announced to the public in 2019, long before public beta release this June. I understand it is kind of hard to track small, bootstrapped startups with no mainstream exposure, but as I said this is for historic accuracy.
Filter lists can be hosted anywhere and imported with the @ syntax:
# Make these domains stand out in results
+en.wikipedia.org
+stackoverflow.com
+github.com
+api.rubyonrails.org
# SPAM - never show these results
experts-exchange.com
# Pull filters from external source
@https://clobapi.herokuapp.com/default-filters.txt
This default list is the only one I distribute but users have come up with own lists.
It would be nice to have a Github repo with such lists (or meta lists: the @ syntax works recursively, allowing lists to import other lists).
Your suggestion of having a standard for the list syntax is interesting.
It's not necessarily hard to come up with this independently.
I hadn't heard of Kagi before until recently, and only just seen this Brave Goggle feature, but I had a very similar idea with my own search https://namusearch.com/ - Search using user defined url lists which can be publicly shared
I think I initially had the idea by thinking about uBlock but for Search.
From what I can see the Lenses feature only allows to specify up to 10 domains? (Screenshot in the article linked above). If that’s the case I don’t see how Lenses and Goggles are comparable.
Goggles allows to specify thousands of rules, not only on domain but also URL patterns and in the future matching on elements of the page as well (e.g. titles, etc.)
It is also not clear that Lenses predates the Goggles whitepaper. We’ve been playing with the idea of Goggles for a long time.
This paper proposes an open and collaborative system by whicha community, or a single user, can create sets of rules and filters, called Goggles, to define the space which a search engine can pull results from. Instead of a single ranking algorithm, we could have as many as needed, overcoming the biases that a single actor (the search engine) embeds into the results ... Such system would be made possible by the availability of a host search engine, providing the index and infrastructure, which are unlikely to be replicated without major development and infrastructure costs.
Unironically, a multitude of biases in search engine results is just what we need. And the difficulty in building your own index is just why we don't have it. I would love to have my own version of google-without-the-stupid-stuff according to people I specifically identify and respect.
I don't think we yet appreciate the importance of good bubble hygeine on mental health, and this is a bespoke bubble construction kit.
Absolutely! I see a lot of people complain about twitter, but if you actively curate who you want to see and turn off recommendation posts it can be a very pleasant experience. There's loads of positive communities posting heartwarming and uplifting content. It's just that rage and anger are optimized by the algorithms, you have to actively curate your bubble to counteract.
Goggles have a lot of promise. I'm excited about the concepts Brave is bringing forth.
The pinterest images sometimes give me exactly what I want, but make it harder to get to what I want. I would loved if the pinterest rank space was saved, but replaced with a link from a reverse image search of that image.
What does anyone think of the name "Goggles"? I wonder if they would have named it this if Google didn't exist. Seems like a genius name to me, under the circumstances!
Also a ripe opportunity for Google's lawyers to go after them as it creates confusion in the marketplace. Or maybe a marketing opportunity for them, if they play the David vs. Goliath card, should Google come after them.
Probably not the best idea, given how similar it to "Google", but I assume all better alternatives were trademarked away or something. Then again, if Google would be stupid enough to declare they own the word "goggles", it may generate a lot of PR for the project that they would never get otherwise. So may end up a win.
Does anyone have thoughts about how to use these to eliminate Amazon-Affiliate pop-up shops with auto-generated listicles of products no one so much as even looked at?
I would love a "Product Reviews" goggle that helps find legitimate reviews or recommendations without having to narrow to somewhere specific like reddit.
It might be too computationally intensive to make publicly available, but I would love it if they gave more in-depth controls for goggles beyond URL filtering. Being able to penalize sites for Amazon links, ad counts, or numbered lists or to boost sites for linking to high-quality content would be amazing.
This is great feedback, thank you! We already have a few ideas on how to make Goggles more powerful in the future, and the things you listed sound very interesting. Would you mind elaborating a bit on how you would see yourself using these features in a Goggle? (e.g. ads count, linking to high-quality content, etc.)
Thinking about it some more, other ideas would be to be able to make things exponentially more downranky the more affiliate links/ads it has (so one isn't a big deal but 4 is), and to just be able to give a generic percentage tweaks for linking to high-ranking sites or being linked from them, but the later is probably much harder.
Thank you, very interesting ideas. I like the option to boost based on a variable depending on the page itself. How would we define “adcount”, number of network requests blocked by some adblocker when loading the page?
I suppose that could work. I would think that would just block Google's ad script in one when it might add three auto ads however. I was just thinking load it without an adblocker and count the number of `.adsbygoogle:not([style*="display: none"])` and `.amzn-native-container`, etc.
I need to check this out. I am guessing I can do all the things I used to be able to in Google, like disable all results from say, pinterest and a few other sites I dislike.
I really like Brave and what it is trying to do. I've been using it as my main browser (with the brave engine) and I have no real complaints. Firefox has been making me mad lately(more-so the corporation and its stupidity than the browser itself) and so...Brave.
However, I will not recommend it to my father/mother. I think it is too geared towards techies, and full of traps to confuse people less involved in online tech culture. All this talk of crypto/wallets/coins/ads and the associated buttons and icons everywhere will just confuse the hell out of them. You need to spend a bunch of time disabling stuff or setting things up that they will just not do. Kind of a shame, because the out-of-the-box experience is really good for privacy and ad blocking, etc...
The same could be said for products it is supposed to compete with? Should we really ignore the "rest" or strive to have products where there is no "rest" to ignore?
When I was teaching programming students were bewildered, befuddled, and confused by the incorrect, out-of-version, and incomplete technical information which litters the web.
I have often wondered about creating a curated collection of known-useful information for students to search.
That’s an awesome idea. I could also see professors’ creating a Goggle to restrict to sources covered by the syllabus. Similar to your idea but perhaps it’s news sites or open access journals.
And arguably even worse, they often fill the first two pages with duplicates of the first couple results, making the entire search almost pointless if those couple solutions didn't work out for you.
I've seen the same problem with craigslist mirrors. When an item on craigslist gets sold, the seller removes the ad to stop the spam. The old ads stay up on the mirrors and it's not always obvious how old the ad is for.
They often hide the fact that they mirror SO posts.
That can be very annoying, like when you're researching a rare coding issue and there are 5 Google hits, and you only find out after clicking on all of them that 4 of them are copies of the first (only genuine) one.
Goggles is also open-source, the main difference of the approach is that Goggles collaborates with Brave Search index while your approach uses any search index as source of URLs.
That difference is fundamental, a client can use a host search engine to do query expansions to build a large result set and then apply the filters and boosts that the user defines. However, that recall set is going to be in the order of hundreds URLs (more will take either too long or the client will be blocked); and I assume it would be challenging to apply thousands of filters at once. The smaller the result set, the smaller is the effect or benefit of the user-defined rules.
Goggles, because it collaborates with the host search engine — as of today only Brave search — can apply the filters and boosts to a recall set of tens of thousands of URLs. So the net effect of such rules is much larger.
Goggles is a bit more complicated, but it's for a reason.
> Google more than a year to reach 2.5 billion queries, and DuckDuckGo more than 4 years.
I love Brave as a search engine but these statistics are misleading. They fail to account for the fact that there were only 147 million users in 1998, but today we have 5 billion users.
Mozilla needs to learn how to innovate from Brave. If Mozilla's mission statement includes an open internet, why haven't they considered working on a search engine? An open, transparent search engine would be as much if not more impactful on the web today.
As with most of Mozilla's problems, it seems the impediment is the sweet sweet Google billions rolling in every year without any regard to the work they're putting in.
I feel like I don't grasp the 'boost' concept. The white paper says:
>$boost=XX—is used to alter the ranking of specific results by XX (e.g. $boost=1 would not alter the ranking, while $boost=2 would make a result two times more important).
In this case it is needed because there is a generic '$discard' rule in the Goggle (which means: discard any result that does not match any other instruction from the Goggle; you can see this as a 'default action' applied to results if they are not caught by any other instruction).
Using a 'boost=1' allows you to keep some sites, that you don't necessarily want to boost more than their "natural ranking".
I think it's the "Generic boosting" comment that might have thrown the parent off. The comment could say something like "Keep these sites with default ranking" instead.
I keep saying this but we need a local web search engine.
How can we accomplish this?
I'm not sure if it's possible or feasible.
But i want the discussion to happen. Maybe someone will eventually find a clever way to solve this or maybe it's just a matter of time until our cpus/bandwith/storage is good enough for this to work
Is/will there be a way to combine Goggles? e.g. "No Pinterest" + "Copycats removal" + "1k short"? It would be a union of the discards, and the boosts/downranks either being cumulative, max(boosts/downranks from each Goggle), the current precedence rules[1], or something else.
Thanks for the great feedback! As you mentioned, before being able to apply multiple Goggles at once[1], we would need to define precedence rules. It's technically possible, but then we would also need to figure out some UX around it, etc. In the meanwhile, and although this might not be the most convenient, it is still possible to combine them and host them separately.
The idea of having a separate Goggles aggregator was also mentioned yesterday; imagine a site when you can click a few check-boxes of Goggles you like, then get a new link with the combination of all of them (you could then submit this link in Brave Search to use the aggregated Goggle).
In any case, applying multiple Goggles at once is something we have discussed internally, we're not yet planning on adding this but feedback like yours is super valuable for us to decide on the next steps.
Nice! Ability to quickly choose goggle would be nice, something similar to "site:" or !bangs in ddg. Example search: "integration tests best practices goggle:tech-blogs".
You could also make search more like the command line for advanced users. Typing a ! would prompt a dropdown and the user could select what Goggle to add. Eventually they could let users add multiple Goggles to a single search.
This feels particularly useful for communities with overlapping names.
The Python programmer community, the Monty Python fans and owners of actual Python snakes probably have mutually useful lists of sites.
I don't really want to exclude many of the copycats/spammers, I just want to replace them with the original or my preferred source for that info, which I don't think this does?
This is great. That said, I would love to see this extended beyond just keyword search, to contextualization of a given piece of content. https://aviv.medium.com/contextualization-engines-can-fight-... ( I should note that the word authoritative here just means a particular 'lens' that has been vetted by a defined process—it's a way to make the problem simpler for prototyping. It might for example be a lens showing just accepted Stack Overflow answers.)
Imagine being able to select a bit of code in your editor, and getting an explanation of what that code does based off the content of all of the accepted answers on Stack Overflow.
I didn't see any examples of negative "boost". I feel like I'd much prefer to maintain the diversity of the internet by discouraging the dominant crappy sources than by boosting up the finite number of quality sources I can think of
Great! Finally, a solution that will help reduce googling numerous times, like "blah blah filetype:pdf site:edu" "blah blah site:reddit.com" for good search results.
Man, the first thing we need to get rid of is the sponsored search results which have no business to appear on top. For example, if you Google for "toyota", you get an "ad" for the official Toyota website on top.
I mean you are gonna get the official Toyota website on top anyway, for obvious reasons. Showing it as an "ad" to users, just to milk some extra money from advertisers like this makes the entire thing feel like a scam.
companies are forced to do this to prevent competitors from bidding on their brand names. Google uses this as a very effective extortion tactic, especially since most people foolishly click the first result (ad)
Competitors are not allowed to use “Toyota” (trademark) in their ads, but they can serve ads to people who search for “Toyota”. Brands bid for the brand terms to make it expensive for competition to buy the brand keyword. It’s truly extortion by Google.
Now this is the killer feature a search engine needs. Next, what about a feature to invert the goggles? For example, if I wanted to invert the "no Pinterest" rule to get only Pinterest results.
I don't really have any good use cases for this but it'd be funny, to me at least.
> These files contain instructions allowing you to tell Brave Search how
you'd like your results to be ranked
Does anyone have any insight on the performance cost to the search engine here if lots of users had large rules and filters files? Does this add a significant cost per search?
Democracy dies in darkness, a line recently adopted by the Washington Post as their slogan, warns us that unless people are informed with facts and truth, no true democracy is possible. Those who benefit from darkness have always tried to control media in order to control and manipulate public opinion with propaganda. Until recently, propaganda has been the exclusive domain of nation-states or state-sponsored actors through mass media [19]. With the mass popularization of the Web in the last two decades and the subsequent privatization of it by big platforms like Google, YouTube and Facebook, the paradigm has changed. Propaganda is no longer a tool of an elite, but it has been commoditized to the extent that it is as accessible as advertisement, becoming a weapon that too many actors have access to. One must appreciate the irony that those most vocal about the risks of propaganda are those who controlled it in the past.
Nevertheless, the risk of fake-news—a neologism created to mitigate cognitive dissonance—cannot be ignored [5, 6, 30, 33, 36]. It is dangerous for a society if people living in it cannot distinguish between facts, opinions and outright misinformation. Although this danger has always existed, today the situation is dire if only because quantitative becomes qualitative and although all information is theoretically available, in practical terms it is not.
Doesn't this seem a bit overblown for what is ultimately just a tool to make soft white lists for search results? I feel like Brave has this habit of framing mundane software as some sort of weapon in a grand ideological war. You're just letting people filter Pinterest out of their search results. Chill.
Goggles sounds like a great idea, and I'll have to play around with this more, but visually the word Goggles looks too much like "Google". I think that makes the marketing a bit confusing to average people.
I did a version of this waaaaay back in the day. Naturally since Google was sooo cool back then I called it Google Goggles. Now of course they're not as warm and fuzzy.
Well, it's more like individual curation vs corporate curation. It's not necessarily good for discoverability, but with filters like "remove top 1k sites" it can be.
You don't "accidentally" name a product something that is one letter off and so visual similar to the name of your biggest rival. It is clearly intentional. The only question is whether Google has or will want recourse for that.
Mmm I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I definitely believe in giving users the ability to customize and control the software they use. But on the other hand, I feel like a search engine, in order to be good, should be opinionated about what constitutes "quality" and what's useful to people. These goggles can kind of be a way for Brave to say "the blood isn't on my hands".
Also, seeing the initial examples from their beta (e.g. boost tech content or boost left-wing news sources) makes me a bit weary about its usefulness (if most people, rather than creating their own goggles end up using some prepackaged ones).
so... don't get rid of search engine filter "bubbles" that turn the web into an echo chamber, let the people build their own echo chambers?
I mean, its at least transparent, people are aware of it or have to opt in.
It feels like a weird compromise in terms of misinformation, cultural division, etc... but letting people choose which kool-aid they're drinking instead of letting the "totally not hand tweaked for edge cases in favor of the creator of "the algorithm"" to decide. Out of the handful of "ideas" around wrangling the the trashfire that is the modern internet, this seems like the most sane the best fit solution so far.
In terms of it being an actual search tool for finding information, answers, documentation, references that are actually relevant or useful it sounds insanely useful.
Narrow down searches for anything + "datasheet" to manufacturer websites and a handful of non paywalled datasheet catalogs - fuck yeah!
I forsee lots of angry website owners who run fluff content or bury reposted useful info under mile thick layers of ads.
From another corner of the "search" universe, I get most of my daily information doses through the lens of a collection of RSS feeds I've built up over the years. My feed collection is intolerant to toxic content, although I still see random toxic stuff on the "wild web" (YT, FB, etc.) every now and again.
Does it put me in a bubble? Yeah. But it's a bubble of my own design, and it's a pretty nice place from my POV, that reflects my real world interests, hobbies, etc.
I see goggles as a parallel system for "I'm looking for something specific" search.
I think Goggles might turn out to be a mild retardant to toxic bubble formation, because toxic content is rocket fuel for the kind of "engagement" metrics that google/youtube/twitter/fb have spent the last decade min-maxing.
IMO, existing "search" players (Google, FB, Twitter) are culpable for toxic echo chamber formation, only to the extent that they push toxic content "by default". By allowing users to fine-tune their weights, Brave+Goggles is attempting to dislodge this norm by introducing user feedback into the equation. Like you, I think it's a good idea.
Some people will always opt-in to toxic bubbles, but I think that's more of a human/society problem and not one for a search player to solve.
Everyone has context bubbles already. You have work, outside of work, your hobbies both online(IE HN) and offline. You influence these bubbles composition. Hobbies in particular are entirely self selected.
But you are aware of which context you are communing in and are free to move between them and outside them into the general public sphere.
I see this as more of the same. As you say, "its at least transparent, people are aware of it or have to opt in"
Interestingly by the comments here, a big driver for these self selected bubbles are so that people can avoid the advertising they don't wish to see. IE Pinterest and other SEO spam. If "self selected bubbles" are bad, then "targeted relevant advertising" is worse.
I'm waiting for Reddit & Twitter to let me specify who I trust to moderate what I view. Or for a scrappy young startup to show them how to do it. I see no reason for Twitter's hired fact checkers to exclusively perform this function, just like there's no reason why the first user-and-their-friends-to-grab-a-subreddit should have anything other than "recommended moderator" status.
Twitter's social graph is fairly exposed. You can start with a few trusted "role models" (i.e. you'd want to follow anyone they're following) and build a pretty sizable graph from there, with minimal pruning necessary.
I built a tool to recursively scrape RSS feeds from web pages linked to twitter bios. You pass in a "root" trusted user, and look in their bio and every "followee"'s bio for a website, then look for anything "rss" "feed" "atom" or "xml"-y on the link itself or in the domain's sitemap.xml.
Surprisingly very useful. There's a decent amount of value in twitter's content, but arguably much more value in the followee network of "smart people", and the websites "linked out" from their profiles and tweets.
Reddit, similar but in a different way, filters itself into variously useful, well-moderated communities. Top X posts of subreddits A, B, C is a great heuristic for getting 90% of the value out of reddit with very little of the toxicity.
You needn't limit yourself to r/all and the twitter equivalent! :)
Pinterest is ad fueled zombie. Scrape the web, rehost thumbnails of other useful/interesting images, put up ads, pollute image search results until the heat death of the universe.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
There's a substantive discussion to be had about a tradeoff between individual control, institutional biases, and echo chambers, but setting the thread on fire is not the way to have it.
We've had to ask you this kind of thing more than once before:
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit here more to heart? We want curious conversation across differences, not name-calling and enemy-bashing.
You're saying it like people choosing how to consume the information by themselves - rather than the choice being made by their betters somewhere deep inside the corporate guts of Google, Facebook, etc. - is a bad thing. It's nothing of the sort. And yes, if people are free to choose who to trust, somebody would make a mistake and trust wrong people. That's inevitable consequence of freedom. The only alternative is to have a choice taken away and everybody rely on the choices that somebody made for them.
> But it's cool because it will be a "conscious" choice
Exactly. You probably meant it to be sarcastic, but it's actually true.
I think it can't be solved by a search engine. If you search for conspiracy junk that's what will be surfaced. Attempts to correct for this will just introduce other biases until the search engine maker likes what they see. Introducing contrary content into search results will annoy users, and also surface fringe junk more frequently.
A search engine is bias. If you wanted unbiased results, you would sort the results randomly. Maybe even return random URLs without regard for what was in the search query.
It's a personal responsibility of each person to deal with their confirmation bias. You can't outsource it to a bunch of underpaid overworked subcontractors, even if they are called "fact checkers" or "moderation team" by their employers at Facebook or Google. The way to reduce the consequences of bad thinking patterns is not to censor more and force-feed people the "approved truth". It's to educate more and to earn people's trust by telling them the truth. It's not easy and it's not a guarantee of success. But it's the only way that can actually improve anything, as opposed to just creating more and more people that can't even talk to each other.
The purpose of a search engine is to help people find what they're searching for, full stop. We can't go around transforming every class of tool into some kind of galaxy-brained universal-utility-maximizer. Things, meaning not-people, should just do what they're expected to do. Calculators help child traffickers compute the profits they make from their victims, as they should. Search engines should find what you ask them to find. Or at least, there should be something in existence that we could call a "search engine" which just does that one thing and does it well. I don't expect Google to change or anything, they can do what they want. But it's absolutely not wrong to have something that just accomplishes the task of finding a thing you want to find on the Internet, any more than its wrong to have a thing that just compiles code--any code--to an efficient list of CPU instructions.
A tool that has one primary purpose but also does no evil is an insanely complex, corruptible, expensive, and ineffective tool.
I don't think this is how we reach people. The antivax people I know aren't won over by seeing a public health official on TV or in the news. The person most likely to reach them is their physician -- but only if they are a strong personality.
On the plus side, it may mean less vitriol in the comments section.
People get applied unrepresentative negative labels because they ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
So they get called terms that squash conversation and have a purpose to see them shunned.
You see, any disagreement with any official government policy or statement - even if it changed the next day - is going to get you the "anti-" label. As witnessed right here in the comments. The term is not supposed to be helpful, it is supposed to be used as a bludgeon, do dismiss people instead of considering their arguments on merits.
>ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
This is a common conspiracy red herring because anti-vaxxers by definition have already made a choice to be anti-vaccine.
Very few people are still genuinely debating the merits of vaccines (or the covid vaccine), and those who choose against vaccines try to nobilize their opinion as being some unsung investigators.
UFO enthusiasts, big foot hunters, and other conspiricists shine themselves in the same light.
- 40-year old with no health conditions. Suspects of having contracted Covid back in February of 2020 (symptoms were high-fever, a really bad sore throat, anosmia) but due to lack of tests at the time could not confirm it.
- Inclined to oppose vaccine mandates. Doesn't believe that any vaccine in particular is "dangerous", but that mass-vaccination brings systemic risks. (Black swans)
- Got the vaccine anyway as soon as they were available in Spring 2021. Got the booster in end of 2021.
- Has two kids of school age, all of them received the commonly scheduled vaccines for "traditional" diseases.
- Opposes vaccination of healthy children for Covid. Prefers the policy of frequent testing instead.
- Supports the eventual decision to have scheduled Covid vaccinations like the flu: for older people and those with health conditions, or anyone recommended by a doctor.
- Despite triple-shot, got infected (this time confirmed by rapid tests and a PCR) in February 2022. Symptoms were again high-fever and a bad throat. No anosmia. Kids also got infected, only one of them with symptoms of fever for one day and two days of coughing.
- Not planning to get the fourth booster, unless required for practical reasons.
So... What's your verdict? Anti-vaxxer? Conspiracy theorist?
You think of vaccines purely in terms of their impact on the injected individual. You don’t seem to generally consider the value of population level vaccination rates in preventing the spread or impact of diseases on people other than you or your family members.
It’s a reasonable position, and I’m casting no moral judgement on you for it.
But, consider: Polio is a disease which is like the flu for the vast majority of cases. Child mortality rates are less than 5% of the 0.5% of cases who develop a central nervous system infection. Given those numbers, why should we vaccinate healthy kids against polio? The answer is not because vaccinating everyone ensures we prevent those cases from developing - it’s because vaccinating everyone wipes the disease out.
That same individualist perspective probably inclines you to think that other people’s vaccination decisions don’t have much impact on you, so you don’t particularly care if other people are antivax.
I would just encourage you to consider that vaccination is not entirely an individual choice and that the existence of a vocal antivax community reduces the value to our collective health that your family’s participation in regular vaccine schedules is supposed to buy. Your kids took the risk of those vaccines to help us maintain a herd immunity to measles, mumps, rubella and polio - but antivaxers who don’t participate in those programs and discourage such participation make that immunity more fragile.
The polio vaccine does not require frequent boosters. It is a different risk profile for a one-time shot vs a frequent injection. Risks compound, the benefits don't.
The polio vaccine is administered only in a segment of the population. If there is risk of, e.g, a "bad batch" of vaccines that could be fatal, we would be potentially causing harm to kids of a very-specific age. If we are talking about mass-vaccination every six months for everyone, the risk of a "bad batch" would lead to potentially everyone being harmed.
The polio vaccine has been administered for decades already. Its safety is not just measured by a bunch of lab tests. Its safety is proven in the field.
Polio is a disease that is somewhat stable. Covid started with high fatality rates (as it usually happens with any new virus entering a population) but will tend to become endemic and mutate to be less harmful, like other seasonal respiratory diseases. Again, I totally supported and encouraged high vaccination rates when its risks were unknown, but now we have more information and I don't see why we should treat it any differently than what we do with the flu.
Nobilizing your opinion on morality doesn't justify your lack of understanding of vaccine mandates. This is exactly the counterpoint I made to OP that you're doing now.
But I suspect you know that, which is why you're not addressing my comment.
I don't get it. If you knew you were going to get so upset about and be averse to discussing the answer on your anti-vaxx opinion, why did you even ask about it?
I am not upset at all. I am just demonstrating the point of OP: no matter how many points in common I can have with you, you are still calling me anti-vaxx, i.e, you are more focused in using a "term that squash conversation and have a purpose to see them shunned" than in finding ways to resolve differences with harmony.
IOW, you destroy all chance of a nuanced conversation and you will not accept anything except total submission to your line of thinking. This is the pure essence of Fascism.
There is no nuanced conversation when one participant asks a question and then vaguely hand-waves other comments while refusing to address the answer on how they're wrong about R0 goals with viral mandates.
This bad-faith pattern of behavior here is more to my original point about antivaxxers seeking to nobilize their own opinion as a matter of their identity, rather than being genuinely interested in discussing or investigating facts.
If you couldn't find the sibling comment and needed me to copy-paste the comment, you could've just said so...
---
Herd immunization was estimated to be reached with 60-70% of vaccination. I'd be totally in favor of as much campaigning as possible to get to those levels. I was rushing to get the vaccines whenever I could just to contribute to this number.
At the same time, I don't think it is morally justifiable to force anyone to inject a substance in their bodies.
Even if the number was higher, I was still encouraging people to get the vaccine. Even when it was clear that vaccine was not that effective to stop infection or reduce spread, I would still tell people "at least it can help you to build up your own immunity". But I would never defend the idea that people should be forced or compelled to get the vaccine.
The sibling comment (the one that I originally responded) stated that "I don't understand vaccines because individual effects are not as potent without the herd effects" and that "if you oppose mandates, you don't understand vaccines and you are anti-vax"
Your "argument" (or whatever passed for one) was "you lack a critical understanding of how vaccines work, so you are inclined (sic?) to be anti-vaxx"
The issue of both the sibling comment and your own is that they assume that any two people with the same information can only reach the same "logical" conclusion. My response was an attempt to show that this is not true.
- It is possible to simultaneously (a) understand the concept of herd immunization, (b) take the vaccine and campaign for others to do the same and (c) still be against vaccine mandates.
- It is possible to simultaneously (a) understand the importance of keeping R0 low, (b) take the vaccine and campaign for others to do anything possible to reduce spread and (c) still be against vaccine mandates.
- It's not because someone is against vaccine mandates, that the person is anti-vax.
Does it help if I lay everything out like this, or would you need me to pre-chew it a bit for you?
If you "oppose vaccine mandates" you don't understand how vaccines work and are antivax, full stop. Their individual effects are far less potent without the herd effects.
And here we go - now "anti-vax" also means "opposed to the government using force to make every single person to take certain medication". That's as stupid as saying somebody is "pro-murder" because they oppose the idea of people spending all their lives under house arrest - under the theory that this would reduce the number of murders. Since you oppose the action that reduces the number of murders - you are clearly "pro-murder"!
You retained your bodily rights with the covid vaccine because nobody forced you to take it - full stop. You forfeited certain public privileges by opting out of the vaccine because you made yourself a lethal threat (a literal plague rat) to others. Next you'll be saying that driving drunk is your bodily right too.
Grandstanding and pretending you're under house arrest or had a gun to your head is bordering on a persecution fetish. Intentional motivation or not, the actions of rejecting the covid vaccine for non-medical reasons is definitely pro-plague.
It's makes as much sense as saying when the mugger on the street says
"your wallet or your life", it's just a proposal for a voluntary transaction - after all, if you give up your wallet, no harm will come to you, and it's certainly entirely in your free choice to choose just that. And if you make yourself a threat to him by refusing to give him so needed cash - well, it's on you mate.
> Grandstanding and pretending you're under house arrest or had a gun to your head is bordering on a persecution fetish
I think your reading comprehension is lacking. Please try to read on the concept of "analogy". I gave you one more above as an exercise. To make it easier for you, I will reveal now that I did not actually claim people are getting robbed when vaccinated, and people are not actually getting shot when they refuse to get vaccinated. The point of the "analogy" thing is to emphasize a certain structure of the situation by imagining some other situation - "other" is the key word here, meaning the situation is not the same - which shares some structural element with the situation being illustrated. In this case, something being a "free choice" seemingly, but due to very grave consequences attached to one of the choices, not being choice at all but rather an exercise in coercion - which in both cases btw nobody is really intending to hide, the coercive element is there precisely because only one result is considered acceptable by the coercing power. Hope this helps you with understanding the concept behind the "analogy" device.
> you don't understand how vaccines work and are antivax, full stop.
To quote the GGP: People get applied unrepresentative negative labels because they ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
Your comment: Q.E.D.
> Their individual effects are far less potent without the herd effects.
Herd immunization was estimated to be reached with 60-70% of vaccination. I'd be totally in favor of as much campaigning as possible to get to those levels. I was rushing to get the vaccines whenever I could just to contribute to this number.
At the same time, I don't think it is morally justified to force anyone to inject a substance in their bodies.
Even if the number was higher, I was still encouraging people to get the vaccine. Even when it was clear that vaccine was not that effective to stop infection or reduce spread, I would still tell people "at least it can help you to build up your own immunity". But I would never defend the idea people should be forced or compelled to get the vaccine.
By which definition? There are a lot of people that doubt effectiveness or risk-reward benefits of some vaccines, and choose not to take them by themselves for one reason or another. There are much less people that oppose any medication called "vaccine" on general principle, just because it is called so. Conflating all variety of people's opinions about all variety of medications called "vaccines" into a binary "for-against" choice and establishing a tribal barrier that discards everybody with a wrong value of the bit as "conspiracy" is a useless exercise for anything except making yourself feel better because you have the right bit value, not like those idiots.
And of course, for each new vaccine, its merits must be debated, and its risk-reward profile (no medication is ever without risks) needs to be discussed on merits. Saying it can not and should not happen only paints you as a quasi-religious zealot who would refuse to even look at facts and consider them - that's not how science is or should be done.
The semantics of anti-vaxx here almost exclusively to people who opted out of covid vaccines/mandates for non-medical reasons, or people who still follow Jenny McCarthy's view on standard vaccinations for which risk/reward profiles have already been established.
Nope, we just witnessed using "anti-vax" label for people that oppose mandatory vaccinations, even if they themselves are vaccinated up to the tip of their head. This term is a bludgeon designed to mark somebody as "doubleplusungood" and thus summarily dismiss anything this person is saying. Very useful if you don't want to bother to discuss some things and support your opinion, and still want to look like you won the discussion and have the moral high-ground. Not very useful if you want to understand things or convince people.
You sound very sure of your opinions on all of this. Your life must be bliss, being right and righteous about everything all of the time. You could use the Goggles to cement your current world view - what an excellent feature for you. /s
Such a reductionist opinion on HN not flagged already. Unfortunately, reality doesn't pick sides on the reason why someone chooses some tool. It may be due to right-wingism, sure. But it may also be caused by, focusing on brave, feeling sick by being fed low-quality SEO sites, quora articles (or even clones tbereof) and more.
And in my opinion, your apparent cure (censoring and filtering) makes things worse, at least from my POV the divide between reason and extremism got way worse since we're trying to "correct" opinions by censoring stuff.
I would love to see a web browser offering user controllable filtering, reranking and reader mode working over search, social sites and news feeds. A "web sanitiser".
The point made is that is going to happen regardless, and additionally biases of the search providers are imposed on everyone. Not to mention that the feedback loop of virality will also bias search engines.
The solution put forth by Goggles is to make such biases explicit and transparent, and to make them switchable. No one can honestly claim to be objective if they are using the "MAGA" Goggle. That said, people are particularly good and wearing biased goggles and believing they aren't wearing any goggles at all, or that they are wearing "the one true" goggle.
technically useful if the first step is to remove SEO bias today then apply goggles.. next is transparency for the goggle filter actions (nothing more sinister than a convincing lie) overall looks useful
All web search engines are biased to sites that are well designed to be included in the index. It is literally how a search engine works. Removing SEO bias would just eliminate sites that are easy to spider, parse and index and rank. Goggles are great because they will eventually become a signal for Brave to change the rank of a site - or even in the case of sites that end up on lots of goggles, delist them. I love the feature.
You apply an arbitrary filter that deranks 'shitty' sites, and then you play a semantic game about what 'bias' is, and how you don't have it, but all the competing search engines do.
There's no objective measure of what site is 'good', and what site has been 'SEO-gamed' to rise to the top of <arbitrary search engine's algorithm>. The measures are subjective, and people complain when changes to the algorithm aimed at punishing black-hat-SEO also punish their website (Rightly or wrongly).
Not to mention the problem of using black-hat-SEO to punish a competitor (By creating scummy links to them, that make it look like they are trying to game the search engine.)
Growing up, my mother always used to give me books that contained content on page one. This goggle really brings back memories of wandering the dusty library isles of Mediterranean street markets with their pungent spices and beautifully crafted rugs.
I personally ? would remove SEO-bias by first exposing the actual construction of the site without SEO add-ons, to some engine for consideration. A simple example would be "built with wordpress". Please note that it is wise to know that I do not know, many many things. So it becomes a networked endeavor, to find and identify "literal attributes" to sites for the use of the engine, not my personal opinion of what the web-o-sphere is in 2022.
A very very significant example is the primary language group exposed on the site.. for example, Cantonese ? I personally support the rights of "minority" languages like Gaelic and Welsh in the European setting, Tamil for South Asia, things like that.. make it so..
I agree, the ability to reliably filter out overly-SEO sites, copy-spam, and other search engine-bait would be a true game changer! Defining and detecting it is of course the hard part.
The advantage that Brave and co have is that SEO sites will largely not be willing to make changes that decrease their Google rank to improve their Brave rank. If Google changes their algorithm, everyone will optimise for the new one, but as long as the Google algorithm is there and the main priority, Brave may be able to extract some useful signal.
my mind boggles at the sheer number of people being employed over SEO so removing that bias is like literally killing their livelihood. i don't care anyways because i don't use google and use a pi-hole AND ublock origin so i am insulated from ads but just saying
The polarization bit is like watching a person who hit your parked car explain why the crash is really your own fault.
Explanations that 'the web is too broad' or 'it takes an active choice to enable the goggle' mean nothing. It takes an active choice to watch polarizing news and those sources will tell you that you really need to only get your info from them. I would not be shocked to see major sites use this to control how people view the world.
"Use our brave search and escape the leftist google agenda!" or such.
An active choice is better than a passive one, if only because it requires an effort, in that respect the explicitness is an advantage over the typical personalization.
The article also mentions that Goggles will not stop polarization, it suffices to not exacerbate it.
No technology/system on any period of time has been able to suppress it, censorship included.
I think they were going for "Active choice is [considered] bad [by] people who think they know better and want to control others." At least, that's my read.
Being that the vast majority of the public facing internet is ad driven there will always be some sort of leaning.
Allowing the users to choose their own filters will allow advertisers to actually read the market based on the the sites that are whitelisted in the filters instead of shotgunning ads at any website that claims to be relevant to the target demographic they can actually see the popular ones that users choose based on these filters.
its still targeted advertising, but abstracted one layer away from the actual user so that the targeted ads don't have to be as fucking creepy with all the data they're gathering on people. With the customer choosing what sites they want to see results from, the advertisers can stop wasting money on ad revenue for click farms that everyone hates.
its a better deal for advertisers, and provides a better end result for the user and some degree of transparency.
It can't make people accept inconvenient/uncomfortable facts, it won't solve any political problems. You can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink, you can point out any number of problems to a person but you cannot make them care.
edit- relevant to solso's comment about an active choice
The active choice democratizes the ad market allowing users to choose, instead of the passive route of allowing an algorithm to coerce the market.
>its still targeted advertising, but abstracted one layer away from the actual user so that the targeted ads don't have to be as fucking creepy with all the data they're gathering on people.
How is it less creepy if the advertisers still end up with all the same data? Whether they snoop on my browsing history or snoop on my search rankings doesn't make any material difference to me. The problem is building a profile on me through snooping.
That said, I'll trade the world crashing to an end for a search engine that knows that when I type 'Angular template variable scope' It knows that when I say angular I explicitly mean angular 2-current not 'angularjs'
I've seen a number of stories from places like r/QAnonCasualties (support group for people whose loved ones have fallen into the QAnon conspiracy) where people have deprogrammed their parents or family members by blocking far-right/conspiracy content via DNS or through the cable box parental controls.
The obvious questions of morality aside, my perception of those stories is that most of the victims are hopelessly addicted to the feeling being righteous and correct and part of something bigger to the point that it takes over their whole lives. They end up a husk of a person all for a fake cause. But what is interesting is that after you take it away they generally don't find something else to latch onto, they slowly go back to having hobbies and normal conversations and normal relationships with their family, friends, and coworkers.
This is of course all anecdata, but if Goggles are another tool for giving people their loved ones back I think that's worth weighing as part of the equation.
Here's the source code for a sample "Hacker News" Goggle. Essentially, it will prioritize domains popular on Hacker News. I could even see a browser plugin that lets you add or remove domains as you visit them.
https://github.com/brave/goggles-quickstart/blob/main/goggle...
And here's the language syntax.
https://github.com/brave/goggles-quickstart/blob/main/goggle...