Brave will launch its own search engine

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The Brave browser based on Chromium has always been known for emphasizing privacy protection, and now it has to launch its own search engine. Brave announces the acquisition of Tailcat, a search engine developed by Cliqz, and builds Brave Search on this basis. Together with the Brave browser, Brave aspires to become a “privacy protection alternative” to Google Chrome and Google Search.

Brave writes

“Under the hood, nearly all of today’s search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies. In contrast, the Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect but without compromising their privacy.”

Brave search engine

Brave did not disclose the details of the transaction with Cliqz. Hubert Burda Media, the owner of Cliqz, will also become a shareholder of Brave. Brave said in the press release that Chrome and Google track users across sites and provide personalized advertising to make profits, and the two have market shares of 70% and 92%, respectively.
Brave emphasized that Brave Search will respect user privacy and will not track users or draw user portraits, but the free version will display advertisements, and users can remove advertisements by paying. Brave hopes that after testing, users can use Brave Search as the default search engine.

“Brave has grown significantly over the past year, from 11 million monthly active users to over 25 million. We expect to see even greater demand for Brave in 2021 as more and more users demand real privacy solutions to escape Big Tech’s invasive practices,” said Brendan Eich, CEO, and co-founder of Brave Software. “Brave’s mission is to put the user first, and integrating privacy-preserving search into our platform is a necessary step to ensure that user privacy is not plundered to fuel the surveillance economy.”

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