Brave’s New Privacy-Protecting Search Engine is Now in Beta

Brave Software is living up to its name, as the company has just given internet users unrestricted access to its new competitor of the Google search engine. According to the press release published on 22 June, Brave Search is built on top of a completely independent index and doesn’t track users or their searches. The new service is available in beta release and is set to become the default search option in the Brave browser later this year. 

Brave Search was first announced in March when the company acquired Tailcat, the open search engine developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz. Since then, over 100,000 users have signed up for preview access and testing of the new search engine.

The company’s new search engine is also introducing the industry’s first search independence metric, displaying the ratio of results coming exclusively from Brave’s index. The metric is derived privately using the user’s browsers and the company will not build or store user profiles. Brave Search will include anonymized contributions from the community to improve and refine search results. 

However, Brave Software noted that their search results might not be relevant enough yet. Certain areas, such as image search, will require the company to use APIs until they are able to expand their index. For example, searching for images will fetch results from Microsoft Bing. And while this will not result in any tracking of the user, it will reduce the independence metric, the company explained.