Web Discovery Project

This repository contains the client (extension) code for Web Discovery Project which runs in the Brave browser.

Setup

$ ./update-brave.sh # only works for Linux for now
$ yarn install --frozen-lock # or npm install
$ ./update-brave.sh # Only works on Linux (downloads latest Brave release)
$ yarn start # or npm run start

The last command will build the extension and start Brave with the extension loaded. Everything should work locally with this setup. By default it will rely on the sandbox environment deployed on AWS.

Documentation

For more information about the Web Discovery methodology, privacy and security guarantees as well as examples of messages sent, visit this README.

Manual setup

Yarn

$ yarn install --frozen-lock
$ yarn start:build # build extension
$ yarn start:brave # start Brave with extension loaded

Npm

$ npm ci
$ npm run start:build # build extension
$ npm run start:brave # start Brave with extension loaded

Caveats for MacOS

Run npm run start-brave-env intead of :brave

Which takes the brave binary from the ENV variable BRAVE_BIN

export BRAVE_BIN="/Applications/Brave Browser.app/Contents/MacOS/Brave Browser"

Useful commands

Open extension dev tools (burger menu > extensions > developer mode toggle > background page) then switch to console tab.

For query messages

Force updating WebDiscoveryProject patterns:

WDP.app.modules['web-discovery-project'].background.webDiscoveryProject.patternsLoader.resourceWatcher.forceUpdate()

After visiting a SERP page, force double-fetch to happen:

WDP.app.modules['web-discovery-project'].background.webDiscoveryProject.strictQueries.map(x=>x.tDiff=0)

For page messages

Open a new tab and visit https://www.marca.com/ (or another URL, and replace the occurrences in the following commands).

Force an active page (tab is still open) to the database to be double-fetched...

WDP.app.modules['web-discovery-project'].background.webDiscoveryProject._debugRemoveFromActivePages('https://www.marca.com/')

After forcing this, https://www.marca.com/ will no longer be in dict at:

WDP.app.modules['web-discovery-project'].background.webDiscoveryProject.state['v']

See URLs on database waiting to be double-fetched:

WDP.app.modules['web-discovery-project'].background.webDiscoveryProject.listOfUnchecked(1000000000000, 0, null, function(x) {console.log(x)})

Force a double-fetch of a single URL, (URL as appears in the table above, it might have been canonized)

WDP.app.modules['web-discovery-project'].background.webDiscoveryProject.forceDoubleFetch("https://www.marca.com/")

Copyright

Copyright © 2021 Brave Software. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2014 Cliqz GmbH. All rights reserved.

This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can obtain one at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.