Brave Search has grown nearly 5,000% since its launch in June 2021, starting with 8.1 million search queries in June 2021 and growing to 411.7 million by the end of May 2022. Brave says its current query volume is growing four times faster than DuckDuckGo, likely thanks to its large community of Brave browser users.
Independence remains a central focus for the company, Brave said, with 92 percent of Brave Search users’ queries coming directly from Brave’s independent search index, rather than through Bing and Google. Brave explained in a blog post: “Search engines that are overly or completely reliant on Big Tech are subject to censorship, bias and editorial decisions. Brave Search is committed to openness in search. It does not manipulate its algorithms to bias, filter or lower results (unless legally mandated to do so)”.
In addition to focusing on privacy and independence, Brave also strives to provide new mechanisms to enrich the Brave Search experience. A new search results management feature called “Goggles” will be released in beta and made available to those who want to test it out. “Goggles” is a feature that allows Brave Search users to customize how search results are ranked, setting custom preferences and priorities.
For example, users may prefer results from small news blogs rather than large media outlets, so they can create a Goggle for them and rank those results higher, rather than viewing multiple pages of search results.
Brave said it will add some real-world examples to Goggles to help users understand how the feature works and what it can do, but expects the community to build more.
A white paper provides more details on Goggles, including an example of excluding the top 1,000 most popular domains for any search term and excluding commercially supported product reviews.
