Het Web Discovery Project is een privacyvriendelijke manier om bij te dragen aan de groei en onafhankelijkheid van Brave Search. If you opt in, you’ll contribute some anonymous data about searches and web page visits made within the Brave Browser (including pages arrived at via some, but not all, other search engines). This data helps build the Brave Search independent index, and ensure we show relevant results to your search queries and support more relevant experiences with Brave products and services.By “data” we mean search queries, search result clicks, the URLs of pages visited in the browser, time spent on those pages, and some metadata about the pages themselves.

Het Web Discovery Project draait op de achtergrond, dus het vereist geen inspanning van bijdragers. Data contributed cannot be linked back to whoever contributed it, or grouped together, which prevents deanonymization attempts. Opt out at any time.

Waarom we het Web Discovery Project hebben gebouwd

Providing relevant search results is essential to building a search engine people want to use. It’s how we create a private search engine that still competes with big tech on quality and completeness. To ensure search results are as relevant as possible, Brave needs to understand some key things, including:

• How closely search results match the search keywords (matching to exact words, parts of words, or synonyms)
• How recent searches are for those keywords
• How often a search result is clicked for a given keyword
• How popular search keywords are
• What pages are popular or novel
• Which sites only allow crawling by the Google search bot

Ensuring relevance also means reducing the “noise” from web content that makes a search less relevant. For example, if you search for “Europe weather” and see results relating to European history or European business, you would say the results are less relevant to your query. Door te leren via het Web Discovery Project kan Brave Search deze ruis eruit filteren, maar op een privacyvriendelijke manier. Making search more relevant shouldn’t come at the expense of your online privacy.

Context

Most search providers—like Google and Microsoft—collect data about your search behavior, both in the search engine and the browser (like Chrome or Edge). This data includes your queries, what search results you click, the URLs of the pages you visit, time spent on those pages, and metadata (such as page title, content-type, etc) about the pages themselves. Other, non-independent search engines (like DuckDuckGo) don’t necessarily collect data themselves. But they still rely on this kind of collection via their dependence on other big tech indexes (like Bing). And this data can—and often is—associated with you personally.

Search providers collect this kind of data to continuously grow their indexes—the list of billions of web pages they draw from to deliver results—and ensure results are relevant and never stale. This collection isn’t inherently bad. But it’s shortcomings become apparent when you look at Brave’s alternative way:

• Met het Web Discovery Project kun je anonieme, gegeneraliseerde gegevens bijdragen.
• Het Web Discovery Project is ontworpen om te voorkomen dat we deze gegevens aan jou koppelen. This means there’s no data for Brave to sell to advertisers, or lose to theft or hacking, allowing us to promise through technology rather than words.
• Brave's Web Discovery Project werkt alleen op basis van aanmelden en is volledig transparant.

The protection of unlinkability

Brave doesn’t follow the sneaky practices of other big tech search engines. Het Web Discovery Project werkt op basis van aanmelden, en de gegevens die in het kader van het Web Discovery Project worden verzameld, hebben specifieke beschermingen om anonimiteit te garanderen. Naast deze beschermingen houdt het Web Discovery Project zich aan het principe van 'ontkoppelbaarheid'. This means we do not link data to you, your browser, or your device. Brave Search has no concept of a user or session ID, which prevents record linkability. Verder bevat het Web Discovery Project meerdere beschermingen om te voorkomen dat websites of zoekopdrachten die specifiek voor jou zijn, of die persoonlijke of gevoelige informatie bevatten, worden opgenomen.

What keywords are being searched most often? What websites do those keywords lead to? How are those websites interacted with? These kinds of directional questions help Brave Search navigate the world of available web pages, and separate signal from noise. And this, in turn, helps us understand the parts of the web worth indexing for users.