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Brave Search beta — Private search that puts you first, not big tech
Brave Search beta doesn’t track you or your queries. Ever. Private, independent, & transparent, Brave Search is the real alternative to Google.
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On mobile, desktop, & anywhere the web takes you. Search private. Search with confidence. Search without a trace.
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Chris Messina
Top Hunter
Hunter
?makers — how will the Attention Token factor in? Will sites that support $BAT be prioritized in results?
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@chrismessina - Great question. We’ve mapped out a couple scenarios. They’re all contingent on user adoption and the feedback we receive from our community. We'll have a better sense once more people use Brave Search beta.
Hi everyone,
To tack onto @herr_k and @jan_piotrowski, my name is Edward Ridgely and I run Marketing at Brave. We’re proud to introduce Brave Search beta. Here are some answers to common questions we get:
What is Brave Search?
Brave Search is the world’s most complete, independent, private search engine. By integrating Brave Search beta into its browser, Brave offers the first all-in-one browser / search alternative to the big tech platforms. Brave Search beta is also available in other browsers, at search.brave.com.
Is Brave Search beta available now?
Yes, it’s available to everyone at search.brave.com. It can also be set as the default search engine in the Brave browser.
Note that Brave Search beta is a work in progress, so results for some queries, regions, or languages may not yet be as refined as you’d like. Please be patient, and please do tell us how we can improve (use the feedback icon on any results page). Rome, as they say, wasn’t built in a day—a perfect alternative to Google won’t be either. But, with your help, it will happen.
Do I have to use Brave Search beta if I use the Brave browser?
No. You can still use other search engines in the Brave browser.
Will there ever be ads in Brave Search?
We’re currently thinking through different search experiences to offer our users. Some want a premium, ad-free search experience. Others want a free, ad-supported model. We think choice is best. Brave Ads with rewards is definitely possible, once we’re ready to take on the challenge of privacy-protected search ads.
How is Brave Search different? What does “independent” mean?
Most search engines—even supposedly “neutral” or “private” ones—don’t have their own index. They’re just façades that rely exclusively on third-parties. At Brave, we want to build our own search index, because this means independence. And independence means choice. Choice for the user to have alternatives, and choice that allows Brave to not be beholden to the policies of third parties (e.g. censorship, biases, economic interests, etc).
Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page. This mixing is a means-to-an-end toward 100% independence. For full transparency and to measure Brave’s progress toward that goal, Brave provides a “Results independence” metric. This anonymous calculation shows the % of search results that come from Brave versus these third parties. Note that no matter the independence metric, your privacy will always be 100%.
Try it out today at search.brave.com.
Finally, special thanks to @chrismessina for hunting us! Accept no substitute hunters when it comes to your Product Hunt Launch.
Congrats on the release of the beta. How does this differentiate from other privacy-based search sites like DuckDuckGo?
@kensavage - DDG offers terrific privacy while you’re searching on their site. Once you click on a result, your privacy goes out the window. They do nothing to protect you as you surf the web. Brave offers end-to-end protection across the web.
Furthermore, DDG is dependent on the Bing search index for its search results. Brave's search index is independent and built from scratch. We have a comparison chart that breaks this down on our product page:
https://brave.com/search/
Thanks for the question!
I use Brave. Sometimes it causes problems in form works, but it's nice. And the search engine did it. It's coming to take the throne of Google. What are you thinking?
@ugur2nd thank you - appreciate the kind words! Please reach out if you have any feedback on the product :)
Hey @janpio, thanks for this!
Adding a custom searches engine in Chromium worked great however the autocomplete query (search.brave.com/api/suggest?q=%s) doesn’t work outside of the Brave site. Is this planned to be supported?
It's fantastic, the monopoly Google has had all these years, it's slowly getting crushed. Clean experience so far, can't wait to see more development
Following Brave since the beginning! Congrats on the launch and keep going guys ;)
This is super amazing, really. Very much needed. I would use this over google, anytime. Privacy is really something that is so important and I'm glad that Brave is creating great products with privacy in mind.
@daryllman couldn't agree more on privacy! Thanks for trying out Brave Search beta.
Been using it for a couple of days now and it’s ben great! Excited to see some more settings and customization coming soon.
@alessandroseni - Thanks, Alessandro! Please be sure to leave a review on PH too!
Hey! Looks cool. What are you doing that's different from other incognito search engines like duck duck go?
@katie_kuzin I have been in the early testing of Brave Search for a couple months now. I'm not sure on the technical side of the back end, but in my experience the results and quality are better than duck duck go while still maintaining privacy.
Hey @katie_kuzin - thanks for trying out Brave Search beta! The biggest difference from DDG would be that Brave Search is built on our own independent & proprietary index, which in very simplified plain-speak means that you'll see different (and hopefully, better!) search results. It's a little known fact that most (Western) search engines, including DDG, use either Google or Bing to construct nearly all of their search results.
On its face, this may not seem like a big deal. But being independent has always been an important goal for us.
Not only does independence allow users another choice, but it helps us (Brave) avoid situations where we would have to make harmful product decisions -- for example, related to privacy -- because we were dependent on someone else's technology. We're not handcuffed, and we're excited to see what we can build with feedback from users.
To that end, please reach out any time!
@jan_piotrowski Thank you @janpio ! I didn't know that about DDG. Tagging @cat_blake also a big fan of internet privacy
?makers What do you think of Neeva? I've been using that and search results have been great. I also really like the previews they show of things like shopping items and StackOverflow answers.
@griffinl Neeva recognizes the importance of there being alternatives to the existing search engines, and we love that. We're aligned on things like privacy and providing a better user experience (for example, the widget/rich header experiences in certain verticals that you mention), and wish them well.
@herr_k - Working alongside you and the rest of the Brave Search team has been nothing short of exceptional.
when brave say they built their own index that is "independent & proprietary index" it simply translates to " we will then do as we please just like big tech because we can" a true independent index should be open and can be inspected to stop the tendency to abuse the power. So the question is isn't it a bit ironic that you bash other private search engines for their inability to provide a true independent uncensored search engine when you are heading to the same path as big tech?
@kayoti we love openness (which can mean many things). Part of our proposal is to implement what we call Goggles as part of Brave Search to allow communities to tweak/modify the core ranking algorithms we use and help change drastically the results surfaced for a given query. You can read more about it here: http://brave.com/goggles
As written in the intro blog post (https://brave.com/brave-search-b...) we also plan to open our index via APIs.
Hi, avid Brave user here. Am doing considerable research on Search Engine UX interface design for SMEs and have found an extreme lack of consideration for that type of user. Being located in Vienna and searching for something as simple as PANTS ("Hose" in German) offers little to help-full local search result. I would be interested to connect and have a discussion about your inclusion of regional businesses as this would aid my research and quench my curiosity regarding the future of this version.
@victor_neustetter - Thanks for the feedback, Victor. Localization is tricky. We know we fall short at the moment and are working on ways to improve it. We don't have any positions open around UX or translation, but be sure to check out our careers page for the latest openings: https://brave.com/careers/
Thanks for being a Brave faithful!
I've been using the closed beta for a while now and so far I haven't had many problems. Obviously, since it just started, there's still some features that could be added that Google has (for example translation), but it can already do more than 90% of what I used to use Google for.
Does the queries go through Google blacklist? Heard about Brave on Joe Rogan podcast.