Brave, the company known for its privacy-focused web browser, launched its search engine, Brave Search, in 2022, challenging the dominance of Google and other search monopolies. Brave Search offers users an ad-supported search experience or a completely ad-free paid option. What’s unique about Brave Search is its community-driven approach. It prioritizes user privacy by not tracking or profiling its users, a method used by both Alphabet and Microsoft on their search engines Google and Bing respectively. It achieves this by building its independent search index, and not relying on other search engines like Google or Bing. This is in stark contrast to another privacy-oriented search engine, DuckDuckGo, which directly pulls its search results from Microsoft Bing. The community-driven ranking system of Brave Search ensures that the search results are not influenced by algorithmic bias, making it a truly democratic search engine.

Their most notable feature is Goggles, enabling users to alter the page rankings on Brave Search using rules and filters. Goggles only work if the user specifically chooses to apply one, and they do not affect global page rankings. Although Brave claims anyone may create a goggle, one must have significant development experience to do so. On the programming side, Goggles are simple text files with the ‘.goggle’ file extension that contain instructions allowing users to change how the results should be ranked. The language used to create Goggles is called the Goggles Domain Specific Language. A Goggle file only consists of metadata and rerank rules. Users can only apply Goggles approved by Brave, so developers must undergo a Goggle submission process that limits them to hosting on GitHub, GitHub Gists, or Gitlab.

However, building its search index has its downsides. Many users have claimed that Brave does not find results for some queries. Other users also complain that Brave often forgets to validate whether pages exist, so it can sometimes tend to hyperlink to pages with the HTTP status code 404 (Not Found). There are several reasons for this. Unlike Google and Bing, Brave is not a multibillion-dollar corporation and cannot pay for its servers to crawl and validate all URLs they index.
Brave’s small business size has led to its implementation of a new feature called Google fallback mixing. This feature is off by default, essentially allowing users to mix in search results from Google if Brave search fails to return enough results. Requests to Google are made through Brave’s servers, allowing privacy for end users. Other users have claimed that the lack of a map integration with its search engine limits them from using Brave Search. Brave most likely does this since there are no map services except Google Maps, which charges a lot of money to use its API and has a reputation for harvesting user data, and Openbox, which is open-source and less well-known and lacks many aspects of basic functionality.

Overall, Brave Search has introduced a new alternative to Google by offering a privacy-oriented and community-driven experience. Despite its unique features such as Goggles, its challenges with ranking and lack of features limit many users from fully embracing the platform. As the search engine continues to grow, it has the potential to become a strong alternative to Google in the search engine market because of its privacy-conscious nature.

Sources “How to Use Brave Search: An Overview.” Brave Search, search.brave.com/help. Accessed 5 June 2024. “Brave Browser Drops Google as Its Default Search Engine.” PCMAG, www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-drops-google-as-its-default-search-engine. Accessed 5 June 2024.