Brave Search is a search engine developed by Brave Software, Inc., which is set as the default search engine for Brave web browser users in certain countries.

History

Brave Search is a search engine developed by Brave Software, Inc. and released in Beta in March 2021, following the acquisition of Tailcat, a privacy-focused search engine from

Cliqz Cliqz was a privacy-oriented web browser and search engine developed by Cliqz GmbH and majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media. It was available as a desktop and mobile web browser as well as an extension for Firefox itself. Composition It is a ...

. Brave Search aims to use its independent index to generate search results. However, the user can allow the Brave browser to anonymously check

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

for the same query. Brave Search claims it will eventually offer ad-supported free search as well as ad-free paid search options. It hopes to explore bringing BAT revenue sharing to these ads in a similar fashion to the Brave ads platform. In October 2021, Brave Search was made the default search engine for Brave browser users in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

(replacing

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world. The ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan ar ...

(replacing

Qwant Qwant () is a French search engine, launched in February 2013 and operated from Paris. It is one of the few EU-based search engines. It claims that it does not employ user tracking or personalize search results in order to avoid trapping user ...

) and

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...

(replacing

DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo does not show search results from content farms. It uses various APIs of o ...

). In June 2022, Brave Search ended its beta stage and was fully released. In addition to the launch, the new Goggles feature was added allowing users to apply their own rules and filters to search queries.

Features

Brave search has various features designed to enhance users' searching experience: * Brave Search uses its own web index. As of May 2022, it covered over 10 billion pages and was used to serve 92% of search results without relying on any third-parties, with the remainder being retrieved server-side from the

Bing API Microsoft Bing (commonly known as Bing) is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety ...

or (on an opt-in basis) client-side from Google. According to Brave, the index was kept "intentionally smaller than that of Google or Bing" in order to help avoid spam and other low-quality content, with the disadvantage that "Brave Search is not yet as good as Google in recovering

long-tail In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. The distribution could involve popularities, random nu ...

queries." * Brave Search Premium: users can optionally create an account with Brave Search Premium to support Brave Search directly with providing independent and unbiased search results. Brave Search is currently an ad-free website, but it will eventually switch to a new model that will include ads and premium users will get an ad-free experience. * Opt-in data collection: user data including

IP addresses An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface iden ...

are not collected from its users by default. A premium account is required for opt-in data-collection. * Discussions: a feature that shows conversations related to the search query, such as comments on the website

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...

. When a user searches and scrolls down, if available a discussions section will be there, and it will contain various forums where and the user can click one to see an answer from a user from an online community. * Goggles: a feature that allows users to apply their own rules and filters to a search. * Summarizer: an AI-powered summarization feature powered by Brave's AI.

Data collection

Brave search does implement some level of data-collection, but only when users opt-in. This is done through the Web Discovery Project (WDP). The project is a methodology and system developed by Brave Software, Inc. to collect data generated by their users while protecting their privacy and anonymity. Users can opt in at any time while using the search engine by modifying the settings, no account is required for this function. As of 2022, data from the WDP was used to inform the ranking of search results.

References

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External links

Brave Search
Internet search engines Internet privacy software