Brave Search is built on top of an independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks. Starting today, new Brave users will have the search functionality in the Brave browser powered by Brave Search, giving them the privacy and independence of a search/browser alternative to Big Tech. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. “As it gets good enough, I think we will try to make it the default engine in Brave.” However, Eich says Brave Search won’t be forced upon people as a default to begin with.“We will have it as an alternative not as a default because we'll still feel like there's more work to do,” he says. The company says the browser, which launched in 2019, already has 25 million monthly active users- in the future they may all be potential search users too. “The world needs a private search engine that is not just using Bing or Google in the backend,” Cliqz said when it announced its closure.īrave has one advantage when it comes to people who might use Brave Search: its web browser. In the search business, some scale matters. When it shuttered in April 2020, the company said that despite having hundreds of thousands of users it couldn’t cover its own costs. The closure of Cliqz offers some important lessons. DuckDuckGo, which has most of its users in the US and Europe, has made a profit since 2014 and passed 100 million daily searches for the first time in January.

Search engine Seznam has an 11 percent market share in its native Czechia, while Russia’s Yandex has 45 percent of its local market share. Google’s rivals can be successful in local markets and make profits on a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen how much of a dent any of these rivals can make in Google’s dominance-or if they actually need to if they’re going to succeed.

Further competition comes from Neeva, built by former Google engineers who plan to use a search subscription model You.com, which is in an early testing phase and British startup Mojeek, which has crawled more than three billion webpages using its own crawler tech. There have been unconfirmed reports that Apple is building its own search engine, although this could see it lose billions of dollars that Google pays it to be the default search choice on its Safari browser. And Google might soon have even more competition.

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