Privacy-focused Brave Search Grew by 5,000% in a Year

upstart writes:

Privacy-focused Brave Search grew by 5,000% in a year:

Brave Search, the browser developer's privacy-centric Internet search engine, is celebrating its first anniversary after surpassing 2.5 billion queries and seeing almost 5,000% growth in a year.

To celebrate this success, Brave Software announced that Brave Search is finally exiting its beta phase and will become the default search engine for all users of the Brave browser.

Additionally, a new search results curation feature called "Goggles" will be released in beta and made available to those who wish to test it.

[...] Brave says that independence has remained at the epicenter of the company's focus, with Brave Search users receiving 92% of their queries directly from Brave's independent search index rather than through Bing and Google indexes.

"Search engines that depend too much or exclusively on Big Tech are subject to censorship, biases, and editorial decisions," explains Brave in the blog post.

"Brave Search is committed to openness in search. It does not manipulate its algorithm to bias, filter, or down-rank results (unless it's compelled by law to do so)."

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