• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 22, 2022

Brave this week announced a feature to its browser’s native search engine, Brave Search, on desktop and mobile.

This feature, Discussions, augments the standard Brave Search results with relevant discussions from forums like Reddit and Stackengage, allowing users to also see community discussions related to their search topic.

Brave plans to add additional sources for Discussions in the near future.

By augmenting query results with forums and conversations, the company believes it is the first step to include diverse content, increase review results, and give those search more choices in query results. It allows users to easily see what the community says about a topic.

Rather than just reading content, curated Forums with discussions can help to answer questions about products, current events, travel, computer programming and coding, and unique of specific topics.  

Discussions in Brave Search is available on desktop and mobile. For many queries, the list of discussion topics will appear near the top of the search results page.

To serve these Discussions, the Brave Search ranking algorithm detects queries where a discussion forum might provide an alternative or complementary viewpoint to the search results.

The discussion worthiness score is based on a variety of signals, including the recency and popularity of the topic; the quality of the conversation as measured by user engagement such as upvotes or responses, and the search quality score, which measures how relevant the discussion is to a query.

A feature called Goggle will soon follow the release of Discussions. Brave Goggles will allow users to create their own result filters, and rulesets to constrain a searchable space or alter result ordering.

Rather than one ranking or curating results, Brave Search Goggles will allow for a nearly infinite number of ranking and filtering options.

All are driven by the community of users. Combined with Discussions, Goggles will offer a set of tools to counteract bias and unseen influence on information.

Brave Search recently passed 12 million daily queries, with more than 4.2 billion queries annualized -- which shows that there is a strong desire for an independent search option.

In March, Brave announced a privacy feature it calls Unlinkable Bouncing, in its testing and development version of Brave called Nightly. 

Unlinkable Bouncing protects a person’s privacy by noticing when they are about to visit a suspected privacy harming website, and instead routes that visit through a new, temporary browser storage.

This prevents the site from identifying a site visitor by tying the footprint to that of previous visits, but allows the site to otherwise function as normal.

Each visit appears as a unique, first-time visitor, so it anonymizes the digital fingerprint. This temporary storage is then deleted when the person leaves the website, preventing the site from re-identifying the person on future visits.