Brave Gives You Search Ranking Control
Brave's Goggles lets you choose filters for your search results in Brave Search.
The Brave browser folks launched a search engine in October of last year. One piece of news today, is that Brave search is out of beta. Another piece of news is that Brave search is launching a new feature that IS in beta called Goggles.
It lets you modify the criteria for search rankings. You can adjust things like whether a query should rely more on blogs or mainstream news sites. Brave is not opening up its search algorithms mind you. But it does give users more control than most search engines do.
To try the feature, search for something, then choose the Goggles button. Brave supplies Goggles from developers that you can choose to follow or not.
The goggles themselves are unencrypted text files with instructions for re-ranking. If you want to create your own, you'll need to learn the syntax and host them on GitHub or GitLab.
So most people will likely use filters made by others. For example, AllSides, which ranks political leanings in news publications made a filter for left sources and one for right sources.
Other pre-made filters at launch include one that attempts to remove copycats, one that removes the top 1,000 most-viewed websites, one that narrows results to a list of tech blogs and one that removes any results from Pinterest. The other two are even more specific. One removes the top 1000 most-viewed websites but prioritizes the most popular domains on Hacker news. Another boosts content related to the Rust programming language.
You can turn Goggles on and off if you want to compare your tweaked results to what the search engine normally returns.
When Brave published a paper about the idea for Googles in October last year it offered to share the technology with other search engines. Other privacy-focused search engines that might benefit from it include DuckDuckGo (which uses Bing results), StartPage (Which uses Google results), and Mojeek. None have taken the company up on the offer.
That's the news. Subscribers, read on to get my take on it, or you can hear what I have to say on DTNS at dailytechnewsshow.com
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