Only a few months after the rollout of what could probably be called the first privacy news reader, the people of Brave are creating their own search engine to complement their namesake browser.
Brave Search, which the company announced on Wednesday, is poised to become the ‘privacy retention alternative’ for, say, Google search, whose massive market memory is – in part – built from keeping track of data from every search its users make even when those searches take place in incognito mode. And as others have done pointed out in the past, if you try to use Google search in Brave’s browser, there are still all kinds of information is collected at the end of Google about the number of search ads you see or click on.
Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, said earlier that the only safe way to keep your searches private is to … pro-privacy search engine. Brave in turn gives users more than a dozen different search engines to choose from as their standard, including privacy-saving options like DuckDuckGo and Qwant, whose headline is literally ‘the search engine that respects your privacy’.
Brave plans to adapt to these types of players for its own search engine, but it stands out in some ways from them – and from more common competitors, such as Google. First, the company says it will give its users two options: an ad-free paid search option, or a free use option supported by the same Brave-centric ad network that jumps through tons of rings to keep consumer data as far away from advertisers’ eyes as possible. And other than the somewhat arcane and opaque statistics which Google uses to determine which sites are ranked in its own search engine has already evicted the Brave team a proposal for the way its search engine can arrange results in a free browsing format.
People who want to take a look at Brave’s new search engine when it’s rolled out can sign up for the official waiting list here.
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