{"id":170557,"date":"2021-06-24T19:05:03","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T13:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/?p=170557"},"modified":"2021-06-24T19:06:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T13:36:20","slug":"brave-takes-aim-at-google-with-privacy-first-search-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/brave-takes-aim-at-google-with-privacy-first-search-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"Brave takes aim at Google with privacy-first search engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David Ruiz<\/a> | Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The privacy-forward web browser Brave launched its\u00a0new search engine<\/a>\u00a0in beta on Wednesday, promising a more private experience that does not track user searches, build user profiles, or require the use of an external, pre-existing search index to deliver results.<\/p>\n

Clear from the company\u2019s early marketing, Brave intends to position its search tool as a foil to Google, telling audiences in a promotional video that using its new search tool alongside its browser provides \u201cthe first, independent, 100 percent private alternative to Google Search and Chrome.\u201d<\/p>\n

How Brave expects to compete against Google\u2014which owns 92 percent of the global search engine market share\u2014is less clear, as \u201csearch\u201d today is not just the delivery of information, but also the integration of that information into a company\u2019s product suite, like when a Google search for a restaurant\u2019s location can auto-populate that restaurant\u2019s address into Google Maps, or when a Google search for movie times considers a user\u2019s location.<\/p>\n

For Google, its search business is not just an Internet answer box. It is the oil that both fuels and smooths its online convenience machine.<\/p>\n

To its credit, Brave is expanding its offering. The company launched both a\u00a0news reader<\/a>\u00a0and a\u00a0combination VPN and firewall tool<\/a>\u00a0last year, and since 2019, it has\u00a0implemented a novel advertising model<\/a>\u00a0that lets users earn money for viewing \u201cprivacy-preserving\u201d ads.<\/p>\n

From a certain lens, then, Brave\u2019s growing stable of products begins to resemble a response to Google\u2019s massive data collection regime\u2014a suite of tools that do not prioritize making life easier for the user but making life harder for those who invade user privacy. (The company has also pushed back against FLoC,\u00a0Google\u2019s new online tracking model<\/a>\u00a0released just months ago.)<\/p>\n

Brave Search features<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Brave Search, which was available to a limited number of users before Wednesday\u2019s beta release, promises users a unique set of features that the company claims no other browser provides. Users will enjoy \u201cfully private, anonymous search,\u201d much like DuckDuckGo, which means that users will not have their searches collected, shared, or sold for advertising purposes, and users will not have profiles built on their search activity.<\/p>\n

Users will also get the benefit of transparent search result rankings and a search engine that integrates directly into a web browser made by the same company. In fact, by next year, the company plans to make Brave Search the default search engine in its web browser.<\/p>\n

Further, according to the company, Brave Search is one of the rare search engines today that is not built on another company\u2019s search index, meaning that its search results are not just scoured and collected by Google and packaged by their engine. Instead, Brave Search is powered by an independent scan of the Internet\u2014an enormous task which was likely made possible by Brave\u2019s\u00a0earlier purchase in March of Tailcat<\/a>, a search engine developed by a team previously working for the privacy-focused web browser Cliqz. That Munich-based company once positioned its own product as an alternative to Google\u2019s search, but it\u00a0shuttered in May 2020<\/a>\u00a0following disruptions due to coronavirus.<\/p>\n

Brave Search also provides a surprising amount of information about its independent search index.<\/p>\n

For instance, every single Brave Search query provides basic info about whether the engine relied on third parties\u2014often Google and Bing\u2014to complete the delivered search results. When Malwarebytes Labs searched \u201cMalwarebytes,\u201d Brave Search said that \u201call results\u201d came from Brave alone. Brave Search also provides users with an \u201cindependence metric\u201d\u2014offered as a percentage\u2014from a personal and global perspective. These metrics express the same measurement of whether Brave relied on third parties, but the personal metric is derived from someone\u2019s aggregate, personal searches, whereas the global metric is derived \u201cfrom all searches, across all people who use Brave Search,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

As to how Brave Search will make money? The company already hinted at two models\u2014a paid option with no advertisements, and a free option supported by ads. In the Brave Search FAQ, the company wrote that both options could be on the table for users who want to choose.<\/p>\n

It is still early days for Brave Search, and competing in the online search market is far from easy. Still, more options for users means more ways that users can take control of how they engage online. Whether enough users will peel away from Google is a different question, because Brave\u2019s big bet isn\u2019t about convenience\u2014it\u2019s about privacy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by David Ruiz | Source The privacy-forward web browser Brave launched its\u00a0new search engine\u00a0in beta on Wednesday, promising a more private experience that does not track user searches, build user profiles, or require the use of an external, pre-existing search index to deliver results. Clear from the company\u2019s early marketing, Brave intends to position its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-170557","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-web-updates"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyforyou.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}