Usage metrics refer to information about how a user interacts with a website, and meta-information about the performance of the site itself. For Brave Search, this can include how often a user visits, how long their queries might be (though not the query itself), as well as performance items like whether content loads correctly and quickly. By participating in usage metrics, you are allowing Brave to anonymously collect and analyze this kind of information, which in turn helps us improve Brave Search for others.
Brave Search is independent, private and, over time, will offer a more complete view of the voices on the internet. It is also new and, as such, we are still trying to learn how people interact with the site, and about the performance of the site itself. Specifically, we would hope to learn the following:
- Number of daily/weekly/monthly visits
- Number of returning visits
- Number of search queries per day
- How long you’ve been using Brave Search
- Average query length
- How many users have chosen to leave feedback about Brave Search
- The operating systems people use when they visit (e.g. macOS, Windows, etc)
- The browser you’ve visited from (e.g. Brave, Chrome, Safari, etc)
This data—if you allow us to collect it—is anonymous and only analyzed in aggregate. It will never identify you or your machine. The data tells us if Brave Search is useful enough to use again and, in turn, gives us a signal that we are approaching a viable alternative to other search engines.
Details for the tech-curious
The standard approach to do analytics on the Web relies on server-side processing. This approach requires the presence of user-identifiers in order to aggregate data in sessions, which enables tracking users, even if unintentional.
To mitigate the privacy risks we rely on an alternative approach
based on client-side aggregation, where user-identifiers are not needed
because “sessions” only exist on the client-side (i.e. the user’s browser).
We do this by leveraging window.localStorage. This means all the
data needed to measure the attainment of a particular goal lives
on the user’s browser.
What is on localStorage, never gets sent as-is. Check the Network
monitor in your browser to look at the actual messages being sent.