Privacy-first Browser Brave Now Has Its Own Google Search Rival

Two years after publicly launching a privacy-focussed browser, Brave, founded by former Mozilla executive Brendan Eich, is taking on Google's search business, too. From a report: The announcement of Brave Search puts the upstart in the rare position of taking on both Google's browser and search dominance. Eich says that Brave Search, which has opened a waitlist and will launch in the first half of this year, won't track or profile people who use it. 'Brave already has a default anonymous user model with no data collection at all,' he says adding this will continue in its search engine. No IP addresses will be collected and the company is exploring how it can create both a paid, ad-free search engine and one that comes with ads.

But building a search engine isn't straightforward. Eich says Brave isn't starting its search engine or index from scratch and won't be using indexes from Bing or other tech firms. Instead Brave has purchased Tailcat, an offshoot of German search engine Cliqz, which was owned by Hubert Burda Media and closed down last year. The purchase includes an index of the web that's been created by Tailcat and the technology that powers it. Eich says that some users will be given the ability to opt-in to anonymous data collection to help fine-tune search results. 'What Tailcat does is it looks at a query log and a click log anonymously,' Eich says. 'These allow it to build an index, which Tailcat has done and already did at Cliqz, and it's getting bigger.' He admits that the index will not be anywhere near as deep as Google's but that the top results it surfaces are largely the same.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.