Brave Search Launches In Public Beta As Privacy-Centric Alternative To Google
In recent years and months, Google has been working to improve user privacy across all its brands. Whether this is genuine is a debate for another day, but other companies are now trying to compete, as a “focus on privacy” has become a big selling point. Subsequently, Brave Search, a search engine “built on top of a completely independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks,” has become available from the company behind Brave Browser.
Back in March, the San Francisco-based company announced the acquisition of Tailcat, an open search engine “developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz, a holding of Hubert Burda Media.” This acquisition would form the basis for Brave Search so that it would not have to rely on big tech companies like Google or Microsoft for search results. Since then, 100,000 users have signed up for preview access and testing for Brave Search, which leads us to the official launch.
Yesterday, the Brave Search beta became available worldwide across all platforms at search.brave.com. Later this year, Brave Search will become the default search engine in Brave Browser which should help it grow considering Brave “recently passed 32 million monthly active users.” The company also claims that the search engine does not “track or profile users,” is user-first, independent, transparent, seamless, and open for other search engines to be powered by it.
The hope is that this will “counter Big Tech with its bad habit of collecting personal data,” explains Tailcat project head Dr. Josep M. Pujol, and that “People should not be forced to choose between privacy and quality.” At the end of the day, we applaud any effort for consumer privacy, and perhaps it will be worth trying out Brave Search to stick it to Google. If you too happen to give Brave Search a shot, let us know what you think of it in the comments below.
