Brave Is Launching a Privacy-Focused Search Engine to Compete With Google

Brave secured your web activity, and now it wants to secure your search results. The underdog browser, which grew to over 26 million users last year, is gearing up to launch Brave Search, a “private alternative to Google Search” without any trackers or “algorithmic bias.” Brave Search will take on the big dogs, including DuckDuckGo, the most popular private search engine.

Of course, Brave isn’t building its search engine from scratch—the company will instead base Brave Search on Tailcat, a privacy-focused search engine from the crew at Cliqz (a now-bankrupt fork of Mozilla’s European division). Brave aquired the Tailcat search engine in March 2021 and suggests that it’s a suitable foundation for Brave Search thanks to its privacy-focused code.

Unsurprisingly, the Brave blog post announcing Brave Search includes a list of tenets. You can read the full manifesto on Brave’s blog, or skim this quick summary:

1. Privacy: Brave Search doesn’t track users.
2. User-First: Brave Search focuses on users, not advertisers.
3. Ad-Free Option: Users can pay for ad-free search results.
4. Anonymized Crawling: Big tech companies spend billions to “crawl” websites and generate search results. Brave Search relies on anonymous community contributions instead.
5. Anti-Bias: Brave Search doesn’t use algorithms to create biased search results or censor websites.
6. It’s Fast: Brave Search connects to the browser and offers instant results as you type.
7. Open Engine: Anyone can use Brave Search to develop their own search engine.

It’s worth mentioning that Brave Search does use algorithms, but it provides filters (or “Goggles“) to let you modify how the algorithm ranks content. These filters could provide additional transparency for Brave Search, or help early-adopters refine their search results on the fly.

Want to try Brave Search? Brave hasn’t clarified when its search engine will go live, but you can sign up for the waitlist today for early access. You could also try DuckDuckGo, another privacy-oriented search engine.

Source: Brave via Tech Crunch