Brave Search on Thursday announced a way to customize search rankings by boosting or removing domains from search results.
Rerank introduces a panel on the search results page to give individual users more control over the presence and ranking order of the websites they see in Brave Search.
The panel lists domains, each with the option to raise or discard the content on the domains in the results with a thumbs up or down.
In the future, raised domains will rank higher on the search page that the user sees. Discarded domains will no longer appear in the results.
A domain’s up-rank or down-rank can be adjusted or reset at any time.
Rerank is available for free on all searches made on the Brave search engine, which the company claims now serves "1.2 billion queries per month and is the fastest growing independent search engine since Bing."
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In August 2023, Brave's search engine became completely independent from Google and Bing, relying on its own internal search capabilities for text, images, and video.
Using Rerank will not change the presence or ranking of a website domain for other users. It will only apply to the user who choses to use the
feature on Brave. And, only on that user’s device. It personalizes the ranking without tracking users.
For example, a professional interior designer who scours the Web for
inspiration to support their work may not get much value from sites that publish content for personal DIY projects.
Rerank will not serves unwanted sites. It will curate a set of domains
for a specific need. And if the interior designer has a paid subscription to some online decor magazines, they could use Rerank to boost results from those sites.
Answer with AI -- Brave’s generative AI search engine -- also supports Rerank modifications. When changes are made to the user’s search rankings, Answer with AI will source some, but not all, information.
Goggles, the technology powering Rerank, was initially introduced in June 2022. It aims to ensure algorithmic transparency and gives users a way to create, apply and share custom filters that change the way results are ranked.
Brave says the Brave Search community can create a Goggle, and “publish” it for any other Brave Search user to use or copy-and-modify their own preferences.