Brave Search promises to be the anti-Google, with no tracking or profiling

(Image credit: evgenii mitroshin/Shutterstock)

The company behind the privacy-oriented Brave spider web browser has launched the beta exam of its own search engine, accordingly called Dauntless Search.

Brave co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich, formerly of Mozilla, said in a blog mail yesterday (June 22) that the Brave search engine will give users "the control and confidence they seek in alternatives to big tech."

To that terminate, the company said that Brave Search will non track or profile users nor will information technology rely on other search engines for "common queries" (more on that in a bit). Brave Search as well promises to exist transparent most how it gathers and ranks search results.

We gave Brave Search a whirl and found that information technology holds upwardly well confronting Google and Bing, with similar results and presentation of information. You lot tin can access Brave Search at https://search.brave.com/, and it tin can also be set equally the default search engine in the Brave web browser.

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Does Dauntless Search really protect your privacy?

Whether Brave Search will protect your privacy is difficult to measure out at this early phase. Information technology certainly does join Bing as some other viable culling to Google. (Bing is a much amend search engine than you may realize.)

Every bit for DuckDuckGo, the original privacy-oriented search engine, that feels similar a throwback to the '90s, with mainly text-based search results only little else. Brave Search feels more similar Google or Bing.

DuckDuckGo does have a "Recent News" box high on the page and an information box to the correct side, as practice the others. But Brave Search adds features that Bing and Google also include, such every bit a "People Likewise Inquire" box for related searches, a box for video results, and a larger infobox than what DuckDuckGo provides. (Bing has the best infoboxes of all.)

Brave Search's results also give y'all about 18 text links per page, as opposed to 8 or ix for Google, between 7 and 10 for Bing and 10 for DuckDuckGo. Generic queries, such as for "fish," permit you toggle between universal and local results, such as for fish markets and restaurants. Results pages have almost as many images as Google's results simply fewer than Bing's.

Brave does dip into other search engines occasionally

Brave Search is based on the Tailcat search engine, which was originally created for an aborted German language spider web browser called Cliqz. Brave announced in March of this year that it had bought Tailcat.

Eich told Tom'south Guide and so that Brave planned to employ Tailcat to build "the first multi-platform, private, browser/search alternative to the Big Tech platforms." He pointed out that DuckDuckGo "relies on Bing as the search engine under its hood."

That may be truthful, but Brave Search isn't quite free of Bing and Google either.

"For some features, like searching for images, Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing," co-ordinate to yesterday's Brave blog mail service.

A long explanation of Dauntless Search's methods on a carve up page states that while "Brave is fully capable of answering 99% of queries completely on its ain," in actuality, a small percentage of results for certain queries may end of being "fetched anonymously from third parties, namely Google and Bing."

This is washed because Brave "may non exist completely confident in our results to be at the level of quality you'd expect," especially during the beta testing.

Virtually the bottom of every Bing search-results page, there's a link to "notice elsewhere," with links to the same search query yous typed into Brave Search equally resolved by Google, Bing and some other search engine called Mojeek.

However, every query we typed into Brave Search, even i for an obscure town on a Caribbean island we're familiar with, came back with "All results from Dauntless." That was pretty impressive.

Yous can check to come across how many results are Brave's, and how many are from other search engines, by clicking the Info link near the top of every Brave Search results page. Clicking the three stacked lines in the top right corner of the results page gives you the "results independence" percent as a circumvolve graph.

The outcome is that in that location's enough of life in spider web interfaces beyond Google. You should check out Brave Search, as well as the Brave web browser, to see for yourself.

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Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting effectually in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom'southward Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and even moderated a console word at the CEDIA home-technology conference. You tin follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.