After DuckDuckGo announced that it would be abandoning its years-long commitment to “unbiased” search results by down-ranking “Russian disinformation,” two alternative search engines, Brave Search and Presearch, have committed to not censoring their search results.
Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave Software (the company behind the privacy-focused Brave browser, Brave Search, and other products), told journalist and producer Naomi Brockwell that Brave Search doesn’t censor its results and detailed how Brave Search is expanding its own search index.
Currently, over 90% of Brave Search’s queries are provided by its independent search index which was built from scratch. Eich noted that Brave Search currently relies on Bing for the less than 10% of queries where it doesn’t have good results and acknowledged that this fallback “could be censored.”
“We’ll get to full independence,” Eich added. “Fallback necessary rn, but fades.”
Eich continued by noting that Brave Search has an “Info” link above each search results page (which shows whether all the search results on the page came from the Brave Search index) and a “Search results independence” percentage in Brave Search’s settings (which shows the percentage of all Brave Search results that currently come from its independent index).
