Brave Search Enters Public Beta

Brave has opened its search engine beta to the world, following an invite-only early access.

Brave made headlines in March when the company announced it was working on its own search engine. Brave has made a name for itself as a privacy-focused company, with its namesake browser consistently winning rave reviews for protecting user privacy.

Needless to say, the company entering the search market could result in a major shakeup of the industry, especially with Brave’s clout and reputation. What makes its entry into the market so interesting is that it purchased Tailcat, an open search engine, to serve as the basis of Brave Search. Most competitors compile results from the top, existing search engines. DuckDuckGo uses this strategy, compiling results from hundreds of sources, in addition to results from its own web crawler.

By using its own web index, Brave Search’s results are independent of the other, Big Tech companies. This puts Brave in the unique position of having one of the only truly independent search engines on the market.

The search engine, while still in beta, is now available to anyone who wants to use it. The company sent an email to early testers today, informing them the beta was now open to the public.

As one of the early beta testers, I have been using Brave for weeks now and the results have been impressive. Compared to Bing or Google, Brave’s results are easily as comprehensive, although it sometimes offers even better prioritization of those results, in terms of relevance.

Add in a focus on privacy that is second to none, and I plan to continue using the search engine on a regular basis, and probably as my default — and you should too if you value your privacy.