A Goggle can be created or altered by anyone. Eight different Goggles were created by Brave at the launch of the alpha. Once people make their own, these will be deleted. Goggles can be used to re-rank search results to remove duplicate pages, remove search results from the top 1000 websites and more.
According to Pujol, Brave created Goggles to try to remove biases from search results and give people more choice. The underlying data, which sites are easier to crawl, which models are chosen, feature selection, presentation biases, and the list can go on indefinitely are all bequests. It's difficult to remove biases from search results.
"Goggles will allow the creation of multiple universes within which users could search." There has been little innovation or competition in the search market over the last couple of decades. The risk of people getting a single view of reality that is created and maintained by a single platform is reduced.
Brave knows that Goggles can be used to reinforce a person's belief system. Right- and left- leaning political Goggles have been created by AllSides, an American company that rates media organizations for their political bias. Pujol says that it's not for them to decide what is right or wrong. The person using Goggles should be able to get contrarian perspectives. This explicitness alone is an improvement from the current landscape, where this kind of alterations is made without the user knowing it.
Brave won't censor or police Goggles unless it is required to do so legally, such as removing child sexual abuse material.
There are questions about how this will work in the real world. "Exercising bias control is an action for the thoughtful, and I am hopeful that Goggles can have positive results." In the abundance of information, it's a huge task to know what's relevant and what's not in the public eye.
There is a flourishing market for alternative privacy focused search engines, which claim not to track users or use their personal information for creepy ads. Brave was the first to launch its search in the public. Duck DuckGo, StartPage, and Mojeek all have slightly different privacy claims. Both StartPage and DuckDuckGo use Bing to power their search results. Billions of searches are made with alternative search engines each year, but it is still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of searches done by the internet giant.
The search results that companies show can be controversial. It can be difficult for companies to amplify political content. Right-wing politicians are more likely to be amplified than left-wing politicians. DuckDuckGo has been accused of limited Russian propaganda by the far right. One study found that the search results for politicians didn't favor them.
Brave said it would open an offer to incorporate Goggles into any other search engine when it first came up with the idea. Pujol says there haven't been any discussions about this. Changes to the status quo are not likely. Barnet says that he can't see any integration of user-defined Goggles. The way they personalize advertising to you and how they collect data on your activity would be disrupted by that. It would affect their business model.
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