“Exercising bias control is an action for the thoughtful,” says Bart Willemsen, a VP analyst focusing on privacy at Gartner, who adds that he is hopeful Goggles can have positive results. This explicitness alone is an improvement from the current landscape, where this kind of alteration is made without the user realizing it.”īrave says it will treat Goggles the way as it does all web results and “not censor or police them,” unless it is required to do so legally, such as removing instances of child sexual abuse material.īut there are questions about how this will work in reality. “The person using Goggles is making a conscious act when applying a Goggle, and contrarian perspectives should be readily available. “We believe in freedom of speech, and as such, it is not for us to decide what is right or wrong,” Pujol says.

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. Google, Facebook) based on proprietary algorithms,” Gal says.īrave knows that people may use Goggles to reinforce their worldview and filter subjects that align with their existing beliefs. “It would reduce the risk of people getting a single view of reality-or that portion of reality that they are interested in-that is created and maintained by a single platform (e.g. Gal adds that the move is welcome in a search market that “has seen little innovation or competition” over the past couple of decades. “Goggles will allow the creation of multiple universes within which users could search,” says Uri Gal, a professor of business information systems at the University of Sydney. It is very hard, if not impossible, to remove all biases from search results.

“Biases 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,” Pujol says. Pujol says that Brave created Goggles-which it first outlined in a 2021 white paper-to help remove biases from search results, including those in Brave’s search, and give people more choice.

Brave search browser