At the same time, Brave appears to be showing its pragmatism by admitting that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and therefore its search results are supplemented as needed with a mix of results from Google and/or Bing: This year, the Brave company acquired the independent Tailcat search engine (formerly operated by Cliqz), which is now positioned as the core of the Brave Search functionality. The offering appears to be targeted not only at the obvious culprit Google, but also at the likes of DuckDuckGo and other privacy-focused search engines that are dependent on Bing or Google APIs for the core of their service. Brave Search purports to be “ the first independent privacy search/browser alternative to big tech”. Brave has been testing its search engine with a selected group of early adopters, and just today it opened the service to the general public with a beta label. So Google continues to rein supreme, not by virtue of its excellence, but rather due to the lack of viable alternatives. Simply put, creating a good search engine is extremely hard. My previous tests have shown that DuckDuckGo and most other smaller search engines simply regurgitate Bing’s poor search results, offering mainly privacy and/or anonymity as their main selling point. And unfortunately, Bing’s limited search index and mediocre query logic serve as the basis for most other alternative search engines, including the darling of privacy zealots, DuckDuckGo.

Even a company as large as Microsoft with its deep pockets and massive human and technical resources has failed to turn its Bing product into a compelling alternative search engine. Unfortunately, the alternatives up until now have been sadly lacking, and Google continues to be the defacto search engine by a massive margin. I can’t shake the feeling that Google is wielding its massive trove of personal information and its artificial intelligence prowess with a view to taking advantage of me instead of offering me better service. However, I have become increasingly frustrated with Google’s search performance, and its commercial focus is increasingly imposing and overt.

As mentioned in previous articles on this site, I am a pragmatist, not a privacy pundit. I’m genuinely excited about Brave Search. Since my last in-depth comparison review of search engines in 2020, there are two new and very promising options: Whoogle, designed as an anonymous proxy to Google, and Brave Search, which is a new and independent search engine that we’ll review in this article.

Brave search beta