Brave Search has launched a new feature that allows you to create or apply custom filters that change how its results are ranked. It’s called “Goggles.”
It could potentially assist in uncovering sources you might not discover right away on traditional search engines like Google.
Brave has some demos ready for users today, including ones that prioritize posts from smaller tech blogs and filter out posts from the 1,000 most-viewed sites on the web. There’s even a Goggle to exclude posts from Pinterest — because Brave knows the frustration of trying to find an image and getting a Pinterest post with no source.
Brave says these Goggles are just for demonstrative purposes, and developers can expand on or fork them. It will start deleting these Goggles once users start coming up with their own, but I’m hoping the Pinterest one sticks around.
While Brave says its engine, which is independent of entities like Google and Bing, “doesn’t have editorial biases,” that doesn’t alter the fact that there are biases naturally present in all algorithms. Goggles are suggested to mitigate this, essentially allowing you have a hand in shaping what those biases are.
After trying the component out for myself, you will be impressed with how well it works. For example, you may have searched for “AirPods Pro review” with the “Tech blogs” filter turned on, and many independent blogs popped up. To compare, you may have searched the same thing on Google.
But you were a little disappointed to find that creating your Goggles isn’t as easy as you may have thought — here, you thought that you could toggle on a bunch of filters or enter your keywords. Well, some coding is involved; developers can read up on the tool on GitHub. But, for now, you’ll wait until someone comes up with a Goggle that lets me view only articles from satirical sources.
In addition to launching Goggles, Brave announced that its search engine is out of beta. It has already witnessed 2.5 billion searches within the past year. Brave is fast becoming the Swiss army knife of search engines. It rolled out a new Discussions component in April that eliminated users’ need to append “Reddit” to the end of their searches — it now displays results from Reddit for relevant inquiries.
Brave is an open-source, free web browser designed by Brave Software, Inc., established on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused browser that automatically intercepts online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings. It also furnishes users the choice to turn on optional ads that reimburse users for their attention in the format of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) cryptocurrency.
Users can then dispatch contributions to websites and content creators, which support BAT through tips and the ability to keep the cryptocurrency they made. Brave Software’s command is in San Francisco, California.
As of December 2021, Brave has higher than 50 million monthly active users, 15.5 million everyday active users, and a network of more than 1.3 million content creators.
On 28 May 2015, CTO Brian Bondy and CEO Brendan Eich founded Brave Software. On 20 January 2016, Brave Software established the first version of Brave with ad-blocking capabilities and revealed plans for a privacy-respecting ad platform.
In June 2018, Brave released a pay-to-surf test version of the browser. This version of Brave came preloaded with roughly 250 ads and sent a detailed log of the user’s browsing action to Brave for the short-term purpose of experimenting with this functionality. Brave announced that expanded trials would follow. Later that month, Brave counted support for Tor in its desktop browser’s private browsing mode.
Until December 2018, Brave conducted on a fork of Electron called Muon, which they sold as a “more secure fork.” However, Brave developers moved to Chromium, citing a requirement to ease their maintenance burden. Brave Software released the definitive Muon-based version with the intention that it would stop functioning and suggested users to update as its end-of-life approached.
In June 2019, Brave began testing a new ad-blocking rule-matching algorithm implemented in Rust, returning the previous C++ one. The uBlock Origin and Ghostery algorithms encouraged the new logic, which Brave claims to be, on average, 69 times quicker than the previous algorithm.
Brave launched its steady release, version 1.0, on 13 November 2019, with 8.7 million monthly active users altogether. At the time, it had roughly 3 million active users daily. Brave 1.0, running on Android, macOS, iOS, Windows 10, or Linux, integrated “almost all of Brave’s marquee elements across all platforms,” according to Engadget.
In November 2020, Brave conveyed having 20 million monthly users; in September 2021, it passed 36M monthly active users. In March 2021, Brave created its search engine out of Tailcat, which it obtained earlier that year from Cliqz, a subsidiary of Hubert Burda Media based in Germany. Tailcat was developed to deliver search results without logging user activity or building profiles.
In April 2021, Brave became the first browser to be added to the Epic Games Store. In addition, in June 2021, the public beta for Brave Search, Brave Software’s search engine, was launched. It is currently being developed.