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Credit to Author: Matt Burgess| Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2022 15:59:55 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Matt Burgess<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s search results<\/span> have become cluttered<\/a>. If you open the world\u2019s most<\/a> used<\/a> search engine and look up \u201csofa for small flat,\u201d you\u2019ll be met with a handful of ads showing elaborate corner suites, followed by some common questions (\u201cwhat is a very small sofa called?\u201d). A few scrolls down the page, you\u2019ll reach the actual search results. There will be some variation based on where you are in the world, your search history, and other factors, but you\u2019re largely getting the same kind of results as everyone else.<\/p>\n Now privacy-focused web browser and search engine Brave is trying to open up the opaque, SEO-driven world of algorithmically curated search results. Starting today, Brave is moving its search engine<\/a> out of beta and trialing a new tool that allows you to customize your search results. Dubbed Goggles, these tools allow you to rerank the web pages that appear at the top of your search results by applying a series of filters to them.<\/p>\n For instance, a Goggle (not to be confused with Google) can strip Pinterest pages from your search results; it can show only results from tech blogs or boost articles from either left- or right-leaning political news sources. Essentially, it puts you in charge of the search results you see. The move is the first for a search engine. \u201cGoggles represents a fundamental push toward algorithmic transparency and openness in search,\u201d says Josep M. Pujol, Brave\u2019s chief of search. However, it also raises questions about the impact filter bubbles have on search results.<\/p>\n How search engines work exactly is a closely guarded secret, ostensibly to prevent website operators from gaming the system. Broadly, search engines use web crawlers that scan and index pages across the web and then rank them based on potentially hundreds of different factors. Those with high scores are shown at the top of search results.<\/p>\n \u201cThe ranking that takes place is both proprietary and invisible,\u201d says Belinda Barnet, a senior media lecturer at Swinburne University, Australia. Brave\u2019s Goggles do not open up its own search algorithms or make its search index transparent, but they do give people more power over how they search. \u201cGoggles would be a little intervention of sorts, a way of making the invisible visible, for Brave users in particular,\u201d Barnet says.<\/p>\n Goggles sit alongside Brave\u2019s general search option<\/a>, Pujol says, and are not meant to replace standard search entirely. However, the overall idea behind Goggles is easy to grasp. Tap in a search query and a Goggles tab will sit next to image, video, and news results. It works by applying a series of filters and rules to the search results that are shown. If you use Goggles to exclude results from the 1,000 most visited sites on the web, for example, any URLs from these websites won\u2019t show up in the search results.<\/p>\n \u201cGoggles are simple, self-contained text files which can be hosted anywhere,\u201d Pujol says. \u201cThese files contain instructions that define a re-ranker on a particular syntax.\u201d Pujol adds that when a Goggle is used, the search engine will build a \u201cvery large\u201d set of results and then filter out any that don\u2019t apply.<\/p>\n Anyone can create or alter a Goggle. However, at the beta launch, Brave created eight different Goggles as examples. (It says these will be deleted once people create their own). These examples include Goggles to re-rank search results to remove copycat pages, removing search results from the top 1,000 websites, boosting content found on technical blogs, and more.<\/p>\n Pujol says that Brave created Goggles\u2014which it first outlined in a 2021 white paper<\/a>\u2014to help remove biases from search results, including those in Brave\u2019s search, and give people more choice. \u201cBiases are everywhere: the underlying data, which sites are easier to crawl, which models are chosen, feature selection, presentation biases, popularity, the list can go on indefinitely,\u201d Pujol says. It is very hard, if not impossible, to remove all biases from search results<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cGoggles will allow the creation of multiple universes within which users could search,\u201d says Uri Gal, a professor of business information systems at the University of Sydney. Gal adds that the move is welcome in a search market that \u201chas seen little innovation or competition\u201d over the past couple of decades. \u201cIt would reduce the risk of people getting a single view of reality\u2014or that portion of reality that they are interested in\u2014that is created and maintained by a single platform (e.g. Google, Facebook) based on proprietary algorithms,\u201d Gal says.<\/p>\n Brave knows that people may use Goggles to reinforce their worldview and filter subjects that align with their existing beliefs. At launch, both right- and left-leaning political Goggles have been created by AllSides, an American company that rates media organizations for their political bias. \u201cWe believe in freedom of speech, and as such, it is not for us to decide what is right or wrong,\u201d Pujol says. \u201cThe person using Goggles is making a conscious act when applying a Goggle, and contrarian perspectives should be readily available. This explicitness alone is an improvement from the current landscape, where this kind of alteration is made without the user realizing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Brave says it will treat Goggles the way as it does all web results and \u201cnot censor or police them,\u201d unless it is required to do so legally, such as removing instances of child sexual abuse material.<\/p>\n But there are questions about how this will work in reality. \u201cExercising bias control is an action for the thoughtful,\u201d says Bart Willemsen, a VP analyst focusing on privacy at Gartner, who adds that he is hopeful Goggles can have positive results. \u201cIn the abundance of information available, including dis- and malinformation, to correctly curate what is believed to be relevant and what not, or even untrue, is a huge task,\u201d Willemsen says.<\/p>\n Despite Google\u2019s dominance, there\u2019s a flourishing market for alternative privacy-focused search engines<\/a>, which claim not to track users or use their personal information for creepy ads. This includes Brave, which launched its search in beta last year. Among others\u2014all with slightly different privacy claims and ways of working\u2014are DuckDuckGo, StartPage, and Mojeek. (DuckDuckGo uses Bing to help power its search results, while StartPage is based on Google.) While billions of searches are made with Google alternatives each year, that\u2019s still a drop in the ocean compared to Google\u2019s dominance.<\/p>\n The search results that companies show, while being based on multiple factors, can prove controversial. Companies may face difficulties with the amplification of political content and issues around free speech. In October 2021, Twitter admitted its algorithm<\/a> amplifies right-wing politicians more than left-wing ones. Recently, people on the far right have complained that DuckDuckGo limited Russian propaganda<\/a>, although its results are partly provided by Microsoft\u2019s Bing. In contrast, one 2019 study by Stanford University researchers found that Google\u2019s search results didn\u2019t favor either politician wing<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Brave debuted its idea for Goggles in 2021, the company said it would open an offer to incorporate Goggles into any other search engine. So far, Pujol says, there haven\u2019t been any conversations about this. And large changes to the status quo are unlikely. \u201cI can\u2019t see Google or any other major platform integrating user-defined Goggles,\u201d Barnet says. \u201cIt would interfere with the way they personalize advertising to you and how they collect data on your activity to deliver that advertising. In other words, it would interfere with their business model.\u201d<\/p>\n