Commentary

Brave Search Debuts Goggles, Allows Users To Choose Search Rankings

Brave Search, which launched one year ago, will exit the beta phase with 2.5 billion queries in the past 365 days.

The company touts its independence, saying the search engine is a privacy-focused, unbiased alternative to Google and Bing, and an independent alternative to providers such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage that rely on other search engines to run by aggregating content or using an API feed.

Brave Search continues to add users and to see high momentum -- with about 14.1 million queries per day and 5 billion queries annualized, which the company estimates based on current monthly totals.

Brave Search serves results from its own index of the Web. It does not track users, searches, or clicks.

The company says it does not censor, bias, filter, or downrank results, unless legally required to so, and it offers integration between its browser and search to provide personalized results without compromising privacy.

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Josep Pujol, chief of search at Brave, wrote in a statement that the release of Goggles will alter the way search has traditionally been done. It puts users in charge.

“The world is too diverse for one ranking, so Goggles opens search ranking and filtering transparently for everyone to use, share, and improve,” he wrote.

The Brave Search feature, Goggles, will allow anyone or any community of people to create sets of rules and filters to constrain the searchable space and/or alter the ordering of search results.

Anyone using the feature can then choose to apply a Goggle — or extend it  —to their view of Brave Search results. Essentially, Goggles will act as a re-ranking option on top of the Brave Search index.

Instead of one ranking, Brave Search offers an “almost limitless number of ranking options,” the company explains.

While Brave Search does not have editorial biases, according to the company, all search engines have some level of intrinsic bias.

Goggles allows users to counter any intrinsic biases in the algorithm.

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