Brave Software, the company behind privacy-centric products like Brave browser, Brave Ads, Brave News, and a Firewall+VPN service, announced yesterday the public availability of its best-in-breed privacy-preserving search engine Brave Search that the company is been working for several months.
Brave Search is fully available in beta release globally on all Brave browsers (desktop, Android, and iOS) as one of the search options alongside other search engines. It will also become the default search in the Brave browser later this year as announced by the company. If you are on other browsers, you can still access Brave Search at search.brave.com.
Brave is a privacy-focused, anti-tracking search engine, which is built on top of an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance tech products like Google search.
Brave Software reported back in March, its plan to launch a search service when it acquired Tailcat, the open search engine developed by the team who had previously worked on Cliqz, a European anti-tracking search-browser combo that closed down in May 2020. Since then there have been over 100,000 users who signed up for preview access and testing.
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Brave goes strong on its principles to protect user privacy by not tracking or profiling users, not forcing ads on its users, and making it a user-first approach to serving ads by giving options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search. Brave has built its own search index for answering common queries privately without reliance on other providers.
Brave strongly follows transparency by not using any secret methods or algorithms to bias results, and soon, it is releasing a community-curated open ranking model to ensure diversity and prevent algorithmic biases and outright censorship. There will also be a global independence metric for Brave Search across all searches derived privately using the user’s browser as it does not build user profiles. Brave Search will make these metrics publicly available to all showing how they are progressing towards complete independence.
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.
Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave
He also added that “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.”
You can compare Brave with other search engines here that give a side-by-side detailed comparison chart.
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