The government’s antitrust case against Google borrows heavily from the landmark lawsuit against Microsoft 25 years ago. But it lacks the same cultural impact.

The federal government’s first monopoly trial this century will feature top tech executives, experienced litigators and an Obama-appointed judge.

The government claims that Google illegally used its monopoly power to stifle rivals, while the company says its practices are legal and mainstream.

Brave Search is an ambitious initiative by Brave Software based on the open-source project Tailcat , which tries to take on the big tech by introducing the ability to search anonymously. Brave Search itself is not open source at the moment .

Of course, there are various other private search engines available out there trying to offer a privacy-focused experience. Even though not every service proves to be better than Google (regarding features), Brave Search seems to be a compelling choice when considering Brave Browser as a successful open-source replacement to Google Chrome.

Here, let me highlight a few features in Brave Search that makes it an interesting alternative to Google Search.

Top 9 Brave Search Features

Brave Search does a few things better than Google and those are worth highlighting as unique feature offerings that sets it apart.

Brave Search is in beta at the time of writing this article. If you notice something different with your experience, there are chances that they may have made an improvement/change. Let me know in the comments below if that’s the case.

1. Anonymous Search

Google tracks your search queries, keeps a log of your history (unless you manually delete it or disable recording your activity). Not just the basics, but your IP address and the website you visit from the search result is also recorded in the process.

In contrast, Brave Search does not track the IP, or the search queries made using their search portal.

You stay completely anonymous, along with your search history being private only to yourself.

This could eliminate the need of using a secure VPN service to keep your Internet search activity private.

2. Ad-Free Version (Coming Soon)

All the private search engines include advertisements to make money (which is fair). The advertisements used by Google Search include trackers when you click on it, which is not the case with privacy-focused search engines.

But Brave Search tries to go a little further by offering a choice to the users.

It is a feature that has been planned for addition, but it is worth mentioning. If you want to get rid of the ads, you can opt for the paid version of the search engine where you can explore the web ad-free.

I think that’s a win-win for both Brave and you as a user. They do not lose on making revenue and you get to experience a truly ad-free search engine.

3. Community Curated Search Rankings (Coming Soon)

Users can help spot the quality of a web resource better than an algorithm often.

So, Brave Search aims to work on a community-curated search ranking system, which will be open to all when it is available.

This should improve the collaborative approach of exploring the web, which should be an impressive feature of Brave Search.

4. Independent Index with No Search Algorithm

With most of the other search engines, there’s an algorithm in place to make sure that only the high-quality web pages rank above the rest. Brave Search does not have any special algorithm controlling the search rankings.

And yes, that is a feature in a world where everything depends on algorithms.

Sometimes that algorithm ends up being biased by ranking plagiarism content first, low-quality web pages, along with a few other issues.

Without any special search algorithm, Brave search uses its own Index to fetch results as per your queries.

5. Private Local and Global Search Results

No matter what region you choose for the search results, you get an additional option to filter your results based on your locality (IP address).

Brave explains that the IP address is stored locally on your device and is used to serve you the local feed of results – which sounds useful.

6. Transparency in Search Results

The web is a vast network. Therefore, to keep the search result quality resourceful, Brave Search fetches some search results anonymously from Google and Bing (which is often less than 10% in my tests).

For the rest of the results, Brave Search relies on its independent index. Brave Search also displays the percent of its independent search index used for your search.

The more users start using Brave Search, the more independent the search results will become. So that’s a good thing.

Considering not all search engines reveal a lot about their search results, Transparency, as a principle, can be a feature to compare with when choosing a search engine.

7. A Refreshing User Interface

While every other Google search alternative tries to offer a familiar experience, Brave Search is actually refreshing to look at (in my opinion).

The user interface looks well-thought and offers a modern, clean experience. Don’t you think?

I like how DuckDuckGo simplifies things, but Brave certainly makes it up for a better user experience that looks unique and clean.

8. No Anti-Competitive Nature

Unlike some other search engines (especially, Google) do not suggest anything else explicitly, except their own products and services in their search results.

That’s fair but potentially also anti-competitive, being the most popular search engine. They do have their reasons which we don’t have to talk about here, but giving a shout-out to your competitors is something new businesses/services are adopting.

And Brave Search does an excellent jobat that. While you scroll through the search results, you will find a choice to use other search engines for your search query.

9. Dark Mode & Tweaks

Yes, the dark mode is an important feature (sigh).

And from the settings available in Brave Search, you can turn on the dark mode , set links to open in a new tab, and control the language (soon).

Wrapping Up

Brave Search is an interesting private search engine that aims to tackle the Big Tech by offering something new. It should be seamless user experience when using Brave Browser along with it, but you can use it on any browser without any limitations.

I like what I see here, what do you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Google’s search engine has become a verb in the same way as ‘hoovering’ became a synonym for vacuuming and ‘Breville’ became the term for a toasted sandwich. But with the current tensions building between Google and news providers in Australia threatening the very availability of Google search in the country, folks are having to now consider what alternatives exist.

Here are a few.

DuckDuckGo

I’ve looked at DuckDuckGo before. Its big benefit over Google is that it is very privacy focussed.

Getting it to limit results to Australia is interesting – it does a poor job at that. But for the majority of searches, it works just fine. I tend to use the “site:” option a lot to find data at specific places as it works more effectively than the search tools on most web sites.

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Bing

If nothing else, Microsoft’s Bing looks a lot prettier than Google and most of the others.

Although it’s not privacy focussed, you can tweak the preferences so the ads you see are better targeted and it also boasts its own mobile apps for iOS and Android. Additionally, Microsoft has openly stated they have no problem with the proposed news media bargaining code.

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Search Encrypt

If privacy is what you want, then Search Encrypt is worth a look.

It takes online tracking prevention seriously by blocking online trackers and using local encryption to secure your searches. It uses AES-256 bit encryption with Secure Sockets Layer encryption so your searches and other web activities are secure as well as hiding them from other users who have access to your computer.

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Wolfram Alpha

Back in the old days, search engines worked by having humans curate content rather than spidering the web and caching lots of content. Wolfram Alpha uses a combination of curation with a mathematical model that generates search results that are computational facts.

For example, if I look up “Australia”, rather than getting a list of websites about our country, I get a bunch of data about Australia; things like land mass, population and demographic information.

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Start Page

While Google’s search results are often considered the best, people are concerned about being tracked by the search giant. Start Page pays Google to access its results but strips away all the trackers.

So, you get great search results without having your search history become a tool to track you and target you with ads. And, it also includes the “Anonymous View” feature. If you click on a search result you can visit the site in full privacy. The sire will never know you were there. You’ll find the feature next to every search result.

This article has been updated since its original publish date.

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