Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Brave, makers of the privacy-focused Brave browser, launched a new search engine in public global beta on Tuesday (via TechCrunch). Brave Search, like the company’s browser, is meant to be a private and transparent alternative to Google’s offerings that doesn’t turn users into carefully surveilled targets for advertising. It also isn’t dependent on Google’s results — Brave Search uses its own independent index of the web to function.
Using an entirely different index is kind of a big deal. Google obviously dominates the space (to the point of becoming its own verb) and even other popular privacy-focused search alternatives like DuckDuckGo rely on a mix of results from larger indexes like Microsoft’s Bing and their own web crawlers….