Brave Search
Privacy-focused search engine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brave Search is a search engine developed by Brave Software, Inc., and is the default search engine for the Brave web browser in certain countries.[2]
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| |
 Screenshot of Brave Search | |
| Formerly | Tailcat |
|---|---|
Type of site | Web search engine |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, USA |
| Created by | Brave Software, Inc. |
| Products | Search API |
| URL | search |
| Registration | Optional[1] |
| Launched | June 2022 |
| Current status | Online |
History
Brave Search was developed following the acquisition of Tailcat, a privacy-focused search engine from Cliqz, a subsidiary of Hubert Burda Media based in Germany.[3]
In October 2021, Brave Search was made the default search engine for Brave browser users in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom (replacing Google Search), France (replacing Qwant) and Germany (replacing DuckDuckGo).[4]
In June 2022, Brave Search ended its beta stage and was fully released along with an announcement that within its year-long beta testing period, it surpassed 2.5 billion total queries.[5][6][7]
In August 2023, Brave created its own image and video search index so it no longer needed to rely on Bing for that 7% of its search results.[8][9]
In 2024, Brave started selling ads (without using behavioral or personal data).[10]
In September 2025, Brave search reached 1.6 billion monthly searches.[11]
Features
Brave Search uses its own web index to generate search results with the aid of the Web Discovery Project (WDP) it launched as an opt-in feature to allow users to help it index the web.[12][13]
Discussions
In 2022, Brave added the Discussions feature that shows conversations related to the search query, such on sites like Stack Exchange.[14][15][16]
Goggles
A feature that allows users to apply their own rules and filters to a search, and share them with others.[17][18][19][20] Some of the more popular filters in 2022 included one that removed copycat spam sites from search results[21] and another called NetSec that searches a few thousand cybersecurity sites trusted by its creator, Forces Unseen.[22] Goggles files must be created in Domain Specific Language and must stay under 10,000 instructions.[21]
Rerank
In January 2025, Brave enabled regular users to upvote or downvote sites to further improve users' search results.[23][24] It is based on Goggles but not intended as a replacement for it.[24]
Search API
In May of 2023, Brave announced that it had launched a search API.[25][additional citation(s) needed] Brave Search API is an interface that allows developers to integrate search functionalities from the Brave Search engine into their applications.[26][27]
AI
A large language model can be asked to respond to some search queries and is aided by content from web pages in the search results.[28][29] Summarizer was launched in 2023. It summarizes information from the web pages it searches and provides citations,[30] and by 2025, was providing summaries for 30-40% of searches.[10] Brave's chatbot, Leo, handled back and forth with users.[10]
Brave Search Premium
Brave Search Premium is a paid tier that is ad-free.[31]
Data collection
User data including IP addresses are not collected from Brave Search users by default.[6]
