• 23 June, 2021
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Brave Launches its Privacy-focused No-tracking Search Engine

Today, Brave launched their non-tracking privacy-centric search engine to bring another alternative to finding the information you want on the web without giving up your data.

Brave Search is being launched first in Beta so that users can test the new search engine while Brave continues to refine its features. Users who wish to test the latest search engine can try it in any existing browser, and it is the new default search engine for Brave Browser.

If you have ever logged into your Google or Microsoft account and looked at the huge amount of data collected about your browsing history, its impossible not to feel uncomfortable.

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Whether it’s your complete search history, your transactions, or your profiled interests, Big Tech knows way too much about every one of us.

Brave Search’s release hopes to offer a competitive search engine using its own independent search index and privacy-focused features.

The privacy feature set of Brave Search is impressive, including:

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. 

If you are looking for privacy, you can not argue with this feature set and only wish success for the new search engine.

However, as a site owner, there is still a need for improvement as, in my opinion, the search results tend to skew towards larger sites covering a story rather than the publisher who broke the story.

While we are not a very large site, we commonly break stories about new research, malware threat, cyberattacks, and new Windows features. 

In our tests, these stories tended to rank poorly in Brave’s search rankings if other larger publishers also covered it – even if those publishers linked back to us.

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Even still, competition is sorely needed in the Search space, and like DuckDuckGo, having mature privacy-centric tools to search the web is only advantageous to everyone.

I recommend everyone give Brave Search a try and form their own opinion.