Brave Search Beta Is A New Privacy-Preserving Search Engine

Brave last week announced Brave Search, its own search engine that promises privacy-preserving search built on its own index.

Brave already offers its free and Chromium-based open-source and privacy-focused web browser, distinguishing itself from other browsers by blocking ads and website trackers, by default.

Now, the company is announcing its own search engine built on an independent index. Unlike many of its competitors in big tech, it doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks – and doesn’t use secretive algorithms or biased results.

Brave Search represents a distinctive alternative to other solutions, listing a series of governing principles that makes it unique compared to any other search engine.

It preserves the privacy of its users by not tracking or profiling them, and the user comes first – not the ad and data industries. On top of this, Brave also wants to preserve independence by keeping its search index private and detached from external providers to provide answers to common queries.

Brave also seeks to preserve transparency by establishing community-curated open ranking models to ensure diversity, prevent algorithmic biases and censorship.

Finally, it offers “best-in-class integration” between browser and search, without compromising privacy.

At this beta stage, the search engine is still ad-free. However, in the future, this will change – there are planned options for ad-free or ad-supported searches, bringing private ads with a BAT revenue share to search.

“This is the industry’s most private search engine, as well as the only independent search engine, giving users the control and confidence they seek in alternatives to big tech,” said Brendan Eich, CEO, and co-founder of Brave.

“Unlike older search engines that track and profile users and newer search engines that are mostly a skin on older engines and don’t have their own indexes, we offer a new way to get relevant results with a community-powered index, while guaranteeing privacy. Brave Search fills a clear void in the market today as millions of people have lost trust in the surveillance economy and actively seek solutions to be in control of their data.”

Brave is also introducing the first search independence metric, an aggregated metric which takes into account the ratio of results coming exclusively from Brave’s index. It is an instrument with which users can verify the independence of results. When fetching results from outside its own index, external support will not compromise user privacy, but it will impact the independence metric.

The new search engine br Brave is available in beta release, globally, on all Brave browsers (desktop, Android, and iOS). You can also run it from any other browser at search.brave.com. It will become the default search in the Brave browser later in the year.