Privacy browser Brave, which has been testing its own ambitious initiative Brave Search, a search engine to search the web anonymously has been now launched global beta.
Brave search project is based on the open-source project Tailcat. Unlike other search engines, which generally built over results from Google search and Bing search, Brave search is built on top of an independent index of the web and touted as a non-tracking and privacy-safe alternative to products like Google search and others.
How Brave Search Differ from Others
Currently, 93% of the world’s web search is through Google search followed, by Bing with 3%. But these search engines collect user data and the privacy of the users become a big concern these days.
In 2008, the Duckduckgo search engine was introduced and it claims it doesn’t store any personal information or track the IP address of its users. DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors. It separated itself from the other search engine giants and in 2021 the Duckduckgo search surpassed 100 million in a day.
In 2020, Duckduckgo gains to the fourth spot in search engine ranking.
Features of Brave Search
It is so confident in its ability to deliver search results anonymously and independently from its own index. Some of the notable features in Brave search are.
Anonymity and Privacy
Brave’s search not intended to collect user information or track user searches. It gives importance to the privacy of its users.
Advertisements
Like other search engines, brave-search don’t force ads into our views. As a beta test, it won’t display ads now. In the future, options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search will be introduced.
Independent Index
It has its own independent index, not like other search engines which were built over google and bing search.
Example: Yahoo search engine is powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Local and Global Search
Based on your IP location you can search locally and find out what’s nearby.
Transparency
Brave doesn’t use any search algorithm like other search engines. Brave fetches results from its own index. It displays how it fetches its results. It even fetches from google and bing without tracking your information.
Compare Results
Unless like other search engines, this search lets user to compare the search results with other search engines like google and bing search.
Final Words
Since the project is in beta, there is no point in comparing now with the big search giants. It’s search engine seems to offer something new to our searching experience. The concept is new and Brave Softwares already kept it promise through Brave Browser.
Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful
~Godspeed
PS: This article was originally published in The Knowlab publication by Vinoth GC.
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