Brave launches Brave Search with an independent index

Brave today launched Brave Search, a new search engine with an independent index, that will become the default search in the Brave browser later this year. Brave Browser has 32 million monthly active users.

Brave Search is now available in beta release globally on all Brave browsers (desktop, Android, and iOS) as one of the search options alongside other search engines. It is also available from any other browser at search.brave.com.

Brave Search was born from the acquisition of Tailcat, a European company that developed Cliqz, a discontinued search engine.

Brave says Brave Search does not track or profile users, has its own search index, does not have secret methods or algorithms to bias results. Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing for image search.

According to Brave, soon will be introduced options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search, and community-curated open ranking models to ensure diversity and prevent algorithmic biases and outright censorship.

Brave will make available Brave Search to power other search engines.

“Brave Search is the industry’s most private search engine, as well as the only independent search engine, giving users the control and confidence they seek in alternatives to big tech,” said Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave. “Unlike older search engines that track and profile users, and newer search engines that are mostly a skin on older engines and don’t have their own indexes, Brave Search offers a new way to get relevant results with a community-powered index, while guaranteeing privacy. Brave Search fills a clear void in the market today as millions of people have lost trust in the surveillance economy and actively seek solutions to be in control of their data.”

The only 2 indexes in the search market are Google and Microsoft. Google and Bing spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year crawling and indexing the web. DuckDuckGo said in the past that the cost is so high that even companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. See here who are Google’s competitors on Search.