Brave claims that its search engine won’t collect your IP addresses or your search data. The search engine has its own search index, without relying on other providers, and does not track or profile users. The company also has its own Brave Browser, but users still can use Brave Search even if they choose to use other browsers like Safari or Google Chrome by going tosearch.brave.com. “Brave Search is the industry’s most private search engine, as well as the only independent search engine giving users the control and confidence they seek in alternatives to big tech,” said Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave, in the company’s announcement. “Unlike older search engines that track and profile users and newer search engines that are mostly a skin on older engines and don’t have their own indexes, Brave Search offers a new way to get relevant results with a community-powered index, while guaranteeing privacy.” Brave Search will offer ad-free paid search and ad-supported free search later on so users can have more control over their search experience. The company said that, while it does have an independent search index, some results, such as image searches, aren’t relevant enough yet, so it will use results from Microsoft Bing until it expands its own index. There are other privacy-focused search engines aside from Brave, such as DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and Startpage. The more popular search engines, such as Google and Bing. record your search queries like your IP address, your location, device identifiers, and more, which in turn, makes you see more of those annoying targeted ads on social media, websites you browse, or even in your emails.
