After months of preparation, the makers of the Brave browser have finally made their own privacy-oriented search engine, appropriately named "Brave Search," the primary search engine for the Brave browser

"Brave Search is built on an independent index and does not track users, their searches or clicks," the company said in a press release yesterday (October 19)

Brave Search is currently the default search engine in Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US for the desktop version of Brave and for new installations of Brave's Android and iOS apps Other countries are expected to switch later

Existing Brave users are not affected, but can switch their browser's search engine to Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Google, Qwant or Startpage at any time 33]

Brave is Chromium-based browser and has been around for several years; we use Brave a lot because it is fast, removes most ads, and works like Chrome with Google's online services

To set Brave Search as the default search engine in the Brave browser, tap the three vertical lines in the upper right corner of the browser window, scroll down, and click "Settings"

On the page that appears, click on "Search Engine" in the left navigation bar You can select a search engine from the drop-down menu at the top of the page

"As we know from experience with many browsers, default settings are very important for adoption," said Brave CEO Brendan Eich" Brave Search has reached the quality and critical mass necessary to become the default search option and provide users with a seamless privacy-by-default online experience"

Eich says

Eich previously co-founded Mozilla, created JavaScript, and briefly served as Mozilla's CEO until he became known for his contributions to a California political campaign against same-sex marriage

In June 2021, when Brave Search entered public beta testing, Eich told Tom's Guide that the new search engine was designed to be "the first multi-platform, private browser/search alternative to big tech platforms"

In a statement of principle posted online in June, Brave Search promised not to track or profile users, to use its own search engine whenever possible (contacting Bing and Google when necessary), and to be transparent about its search algorithm and ranking system Promises

However, Brave Search, like Google, reserves the right to display ads Users who wish to avoid ads must pay an undisclosed amount

We tried Brave Search in June and today (October 20) For common queries like "fish" it is about on par with Google and Bing, showing map results, related questions, videos, and relevant web links

For more specific search results, Brave still does quite well, although this is an area where Google excels

A search for the town of Carriacoua on the Caribbean island of St Vincent yielded a top Wikipedia page, while some of Brave's (and Bing's) other top results were for a luxury villa of the same name on the neighboring island of Barbados Google did better and placed a link to the Barbados resort much further down the page

In the upper right corner of each result window of the Brave search, there is a gear icon that, when clicked on, shows how many of the results were Brave-only In the case of "fish," Brave searched 97% of the results independently For "Calliaqua," however, Brave still returned 97% of the results, which is quite impressive

Brave also announced the launch of its Web Discovery project This is an opt-in setting in the Brave browser that sends anonymized usage data to the company, ostensibly to fine-tune its search engine It will work no matter which search engine is set as the default, and may be used to fine-tune ad results

To join the Web Discovery Project, enter the settings as above The toggle switch is located just below the search engine selector