Brave Search

Private search on its own independent index, not Google or Bing.

search.brave.com

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FreemiumWebUnited States

Pricing Free to use. An optional Search Premium tier removes ads for $3/month through the Brave browser.

Brave Search answers from its own index of tens of billions of pages rather than reselling Google or Bing results. It doesn’t track or profile what you search. The service is free, with an optional $3-a-month tier that drops the ads. The browser around it is open source, though the search index and ranking are not. The company is US-based. On staying independent of the big engines and not watching you, it makes a strong default.

Strengths

  • Own independent index of tens of billions of pages, not reliant on Google or Bing
  • No tracking or profiling of your searches
  • Free, with an optional ad-free Premium tier
  • Goggles let you apply custom ranking and filtering rules

Considerations

  • Smaller index than Google, so some niche queries lag

Listed in Search Engines

Brave Search alternatives

StartpageGoogle results with the tracking stripped out, from the Netherlands.DuckDuckGoThe mainstream privacy search, with results mainly from Bing.MojeekIndependent search on its own crawler and index, from the UK.SearXNGOpen-source metasearch you host yourself, aggregating dozens of engines.