Brave is an open-source web browser based on the Chromium project, but unlike Chrome, it will not ‘eat up’ all the available RAM. Furthermore, Brave has improved performance and generally gives a better experience when surfing the Internet. Brave is also proud of the fact that it is very focused on the privacy and anonymity of its users.
In July this year, it also launched a beta version of its search engine that focuses exclusively on privacy. More precisely, it is its number one priority. Below you will see why this search engine could be great for you and what Brave has to offer to its users.
Key Features That Set Brave Apart From Others
Brave Search was announced back in March this year after the company said it had bought Tailcat. We believe that Brave Search will fit perfectly into the portfolio of a company that already has great solutions like Brave News and Brave Ads.
Now that Brave Search has seen the light of day, we have a clear picture of what sets this search engine apart from the competition. So let’s look at four key aspects that might interest you.
It’s Built on Completely Different Indexes
Probably the biggest difference between Brave and other search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo is that it uses independent web indexes. Google, for example, when it discovers a new page on the web, with the help of its crawlers tries to find out what that page is about.
These are essentially bots that analyze content, images, videos, the language used, and the like. They then store it in their databases. DuckDuckGo, another competitor to Brave, does not use indexes but relies on the results of Bing and what Microsoft has indexed.
Brave Search has its own indexes, but it will not have relevant results for certain keywords you may search. In that case, it will rely on the information of other companies and pick up their indexes. Brave calls it “fallback mixing”, but you can turn it off in the settings if you want.
Brave wants to bring search results closer to people by showing them how ‘independent’ the results are. That is why it added a metric called “search results independence”. As the Brave web browser becomes more popular, this will soon be the default search engine that goes with the web browser. Of course, you can also change it to another if you want.
Privacy Comes First
One of the reasons why people are starting to use web search engines like Brave is that it offers a certain amount of privacy. It is not an empty phrase, but there really are companies that pay close attention to privacy and it is always in their focuses. Those more technically savvy Internet users are constantly looking for a way to reduce their digital footprints on the Internet so that large companies cannot track them.
Why is it like that? For example, Facebook and Google are ‘free’ products. How do they make money on you? It has been said a thousand times – they collect large amounts of information about you and then sell it to a third party. That same party can then target you with its ads, products, and the like.
Google is ‘pressuring’ many mobile phone manufacturers, who use the Android OS, to hide Google privacy settings to make it harder for users to find them in the settings. Brave Search does not follow you and does not have your digital profile. Instead, it offers a completely anonymous Internet search and relies on “community-driven” indexes. The company is quite vocal on this issue and is proud to offer privacy and transparency.
This will come in handy in case you want to ‘cover up’ to large extent searching for some stuff, such as porn or casino sites (the best of which are listed at TopCasinoExpert.com). On the other hand, you have a Google search engine that tracks your every search, your every click, your location, your device, and everything it can ‘retrieve’.
Brave does not collect user data. Period. In addition, Brave Search is free and will be funded with ads you may see in the search engine. Reportedly, those ads will be minimalist and unobtrusive. It will probably use Brave Ads for this, and will also reward users with certain amounts. A premium version of the search engine is also expected, which will be without ads, but more on that soon.
Brave Uses “Goggles”
The team behind Brava Search has published a paper describing the concept of “Goggles”. It is a company in-house algorithm designed to bypass biased results. “Goggles” is based on an open community-led ranking model to reduce bias within the algorithm. It may sound complicated, but at its core, “Goggles” is just a set of rules and filters that define how it will show you the most relevant results from the sea of results. But also, users can create their own “Goggles”, such as:
- Product reviews with no commercial intent: This will rank reviews of websites that do not compare product prices and those that do not have affiliate links. For example, e-commerce pages would not be displayed.
- Tech blogs: This would only display collections of business or private technical blogs recommended by the user community.
- Independent media outlets: This will display results based on your location, with better-ranked pages being small, independent media, and lower down those larger and less independent.
Better Usage Experience
Brave Search also offers a bunch of options designed to make your Internet surfing experience better but is primarily based on your experience using this search engine. So you can choose light or dark mode (Google has not yet released dark mode for its search engine), you can choose the metric or imperial system, whether you want to open links in a new or existing tab…
Brave does not save your location, but you can use it through the “anonymous local search results” option if you want to see local results first. When you search for news from your country, then it makes sense that you want to see such news portals first, not foreign ones, so this option is quite useful.
Brave will not store your IP address, nor will it associate it with searches. It will just see what country you are coming from via IP address and that is it. If this is not good for you either, you can enter the location yourself, without it being determined via an IP address.
