With 2.5 billion queries, the popularity of Brave’s search engine is exploding

There is a new kid in the world of search engines. Brave Search, which has just come out of a year of beta phase, has just celebrated its anniversary with a nice record: 2.5 billion total searches.

Brave seems to have the wind in its sails. The company, which publishes the browser of the same name, announced that its Brave Search search engine has grown by 5000% in its first year of existence. For the occasion, the tool will finally come out of its beta phase and will become the default search engine for the Brave browser.

Over 400 million searches per month

In all, Brave Search would have recorded 2.5 billion searches, including 411.7 million during the month of May 2022 alone. A straw against Google, which swallows tens of billions of searches per month, but a good growth nevertheless since DuckDuckGo, the other supposedly privacy-protecting search engine, hit 2.5 billion searches in four years. The duck-headed search engine still keeps a head start, since it totaled nearly 3 billion searches in the month of May 2022, at the rate of almost 100 million searches per day.

Remember that Brave, unlike other search engines, is based on its own web index. The search engine visits and orders all sites itself in its search results, where DuckDuckGo and others rely on engines from Google or Microsoft. This allows Brave to claim complete autonomy from tech giants and not get entangled in privacy controversies like the competition. “Since launching a year ago, Brave Search has prioritized independence and innovation to give users the privacy they deserve. The web is changing, and our incredible growth shows there’s a demand for a new player that puts users first.“, welcomed the head of research at Brave.

Goggles to “de-bias” the search

To spoil its users, Brave took the opportunity to unveil a new feature for its search engine: the possibility of directing its search results. Called Goggles, this feature allows you to precisely filter the results displayed. For example, you can decide to exclude search results from Pinterest or ban responses from the 1000 most visited sites.

There are even filters that can boost the popularity of sites considered to be on the left or right of the political spectrum. Anyone can create Goggles and make them available to the community. “Although Brave Search has no editorial bias, all search engines have some level of inherent bias. Goggles allows users to counter any inherent bias in the algorithm“, explains the company to justify this feature.

If you want to use the feature, just search from Brave’s engine and then click on the Goggles tab.