The popular privacy-focused web browser Brave has released its independent search engine to rival Google Search today. The company has reportedly been working on its own search engine since earlier this year, and it has now released in beta for users on all platforms.
The company announced the new Brave Search engine via an official blog post. As per the company, Brave Search is different from its competitors such as Microsoft Bing and Google Search as it focuses on user privacy instead of user profiling and tracking. Moreover, Brave relies on its own search index to answer common queries without depending on other third-party solutions.
“Brave Search 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, the CEO and co-founder of Brave.
Brave Search: An Independent, Privacy-Focused Search Engine
Brave uses its search index to bring up search results for common queries. However, it also ensures a fully anonymous search and provides transparency about how its search results are ranked.
Furthermore, Brave Search brings the industry’s first search independence metric. This essentially allows users to see search results that are exclusively coming from Brave’s own index. Thanks to this, the users will be able to check the aggregate metric to verify the independence of their search results and see how they are powered by the company’s own index.
Now, as the search index is currently still a work-in-progress, Brave Search will rely on Microsoft Bing for its image search feature. It will not result in any kind of tracking of the users. However, the reliance on Microsoft Bing will reduce the independence metric of the users.
“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, Brave Search offers 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.” added Eich.
Coming to its availability, Brave Search is currently available to all Brave users on iOS, Android, and Windows as a beta service. During this period, the search engine will not show any ads. However, the company plans to offer paid ad-free search and free ad-supported search once it releases publicly. Users who do not use the Brave browser can visit search.brave.com to try out the new Brave Search.
You can check out the official promo video of Brave Search right below.
