The developer of the privacy-conscious Brave web browser has begun beta testing its own search engine.

Brave co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich (formerly of Mozilla) said in a blog post yesterday (June 22) that Brave's search engine will give users "the control and trust they seek as an alternative to big tech."

To that end, the company said Brave Search does not track or profile users and does not rely on other search engines for "common queries" (more on that later). Brave Search also promises to be transparent about how it collects and ranks search results.

We gave Brave Search a try and found it to be well-practiced compared to Google and Bing, with similar search results and presentation of information. Brave Search hashttps://search.brave.com/,からアクセスでき、ブレイブ・ウェブ・ブラウザのデフォルト検索エンジンとして設定することもできる。

Whether Brave Search will protect your privacy is impossible to gauge at this early stage. Bing is certainly another viable alternative to Google. (Bing is a much better search engine than you might think.)

As for DuckDuckGo, the original privacy-oriented search engine, it seems like a throwback to the 90s; Brave Search is similar to Google and Bing, with the exception of the "DuckDuckGo" search engine, which is a bit more privacy-oriented.

DuckDuckGo, like the others, has a "recent news" box high on the page and an information box on the right. However, Brave Search adds features that Bing and Google also include, such as a "People Also Ask" box for related searches, a video results box, and a larger infobox than what DuckDuckGo offers. (Bing has the best infobox.)

Brave Search results show about 18 text links per page, compared to 8-9 for Google, 7-10 for Bing, and 10 for DuckDuckGo. For common queries such as "fish," one can switch between universal and local search results, such as fish markets and restaurants. The results page has as many images as the Google results, but fewer than the Bing results.

Brave Search is based on the Tailcat search engine, originally created for an abortive German web browser called Cliqz; Brave announced this March that it had acquired Tailcat.

Eich told Tom's Guide at the time that Brave plans to use Tailcat to build "the first multi-platform, private browser/search alternative to big tech platforms." He noted that DuckDuckGo "relies on Bing as the search engine under its hood."

While that may be true, Brave Search is not completely free from Bing or Google either.

According to a post on the Brave Blog yesterday, "For some features, like image search, Brave Search gets results from Microsoft's Bing."

A longer explanation of how Brave Search works on another page states that while "Brave can answer 99% of queries completely independently," a small percentage of results for certain queries may in fact "be obtained anonymously from third parties such as Google and Bing

This is because "the query is not a simple one.

This is done because Brave "may not be entirely confident that our results are at the expected quality level, especially during beta testing."

At the bottom of every Bing search results page is a "look elsewhere" link to the same search query you entered into the Brave search that was resolved by Google, Bing, and another search engine called Mojeek.

However, every query we entered into Brave Search, even the query for an unnamed town on a Caribbean island we know well, showed up as "all results from Brave." This was quite impressive.

Clicking on the "Info" link at the top of the Brave Search results page, one can see the number of results from Brave and the number of results from other search engines. Clicking on the three lines in the upper right corner of the results page will display a pie chart showing the percentages of "result independence".

After all, the web interface has a lot more life than Google. Check out Brave Search as well as Brave Browser.