Brave Search Now in Public Beta

Brave:

Brave Search is available in beta release globally on all Brave browsers (desktop, Android, and iOS) as one of the search options alongside other search engines, and will become the default search in the Brave browser later this year. It is also available from any other browser at search.brave.com. […]

Brave Search is different from other search engines because it uses its own index and follows different principles:

  1. Privacy: no tracking or profiling of users.
  2. User-first: the user comes first, not the advertising and data industries.
  3. Independence: Brave has its own search index for answering common queries privately without reliance on other providers.
  4. Choice: soon, options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search.
  5. Transparency: no secret methods or algorithms to bias results, and soon, community-curated open ranking models to ensure diversity and prevent algorithmic biases and outright censorship.
  6. Seamlessness: best-in-class integration between the browser and search without compromising privacy, from personalization to instant results as the user types.
  7. Openness: Brave Search will soon be available to power other search engines.

I’m interested to see how it compares to DuckDuckGo (my default for several years now) in daily driving.

Roger Montti at Search Engine Journal had good things to say about it last week:

Brave search is currently in testing mode. So it’s not fair to make judgments on an unfinished product. That said, the quality of the search results that I have seen are outstanding in terms of usefulness. […]

There is a lack of clutter in Brave that sets it apart not only from Google but from Bing and DuckDuckGo. After using Brave, I suspect that a reason why I have not embraced Bing, despite liking Bing’s search results, is that Bing feels similar to Google.

Brave on the other hand offers me something different that feels just right and makes me want to return to it, something I’ve never felt using any other Google competitor.

Update: Biggest thing I dislike about Brave Search is the font. It’s a typeface called Poppins that, almost unbelievably, is a free font from Google.

★ Tuesday, 22 June 2021