I'm Sampson, from the Brave team. The Web Discovery Project is a clever approach. For Brave to compete with Google, and offer a truly novel index of the Web, a novel approach must be taken. The WDP is an opt-in, privacy-preserving approach which gives Brave a fighting chance against the Search incumbants. Due to our preference of "Can't be evil" over "Don't be evil," the WDP is not only designed with privacy and anonymity as a prerequisite, but it is also open-source for public scrutiny and evaluation: https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project.

It's not a clever approach, it's basically scraping Google results because that's where your users are searching. You follow the bread crumbs from Google searches.

Cliqz entire history was based on this kind of thing, milking off other search engines by just deducting their ranking methods, it's parasitic. There's no cleverness about it.

I don't know a lot about this particular approach but your comment that it's just using Google results is blatantly false. It all depends on the search engine that the brave user is leveraging, or no search engine if they type in the URL directly into the header.

Nonsense. This naive idea that Brave innocuously looks at user's traffic patterns.

Google owns 95% of the market in most Western markets. There's no "blatantly false" about that.

They scrape search engine results and present them as their own.

Do 10,000 searches on Google and Brave and you'll see how similar they are. It's as simple as that, scraping by sleight of hand.

Why can't they be a normal search engine - because they need to scrape others. Simples.

I had a discussion about this on Twitter with Brendan Eich. He became hostile very quickly. He is not a very nice person.

I would expect most people today find interesting content via social media, and not search engines.