Brave Search

What is Brave Search?

Brave Search (search.brave.com) is a free search engine website for searching the web for webpages, images, news, and videos, that is focused on privacy, and has its own index.

Notable Features

Web search: Brave Search can search the web for webpages and websites. Its search results page includes not only simple list-style results, but rich results featuring large images as well and thumbnails as well.

Advanced search: Brave Search offers a few settings that are shown when you click a button under its search box. You can search for results that seem more relevant in a specific country, search for results from a given date (e.g. "past week"), and set safe search mode to "strict," "moderate," or "off." However, the date feature is only available for web search, news, images, and videos don't have it. There are also no other advanced settings or filters available for those other search modes, such as image size or video length.

Search operators: Brave Search has search operators that you can type in the query. They are¹:

• ext: - searches results with a given file extension, e.g. ext:pdf.
• filetype: - searches results with a given file type, e.g. filetype:pdf. The documentation doesn't explain what's the difference between this one and the previous one.
• inbody: - searches for text in the body of the page, instead of in the title, e.g. nvidia 1080 ti inbody:"founders edition". I assume this is how you type it, with normal double quotes, because the documentation had one of those "prettify the text" filters enabled, and it turned those quotes into fancy curly quotes (like this: inbody:“founders edition”), which I'm sure won't actually work if you tried to just copy and paste the example.
• intitle: - searches for the text in the title of the page, e..g. seo conference intitle:2023.
• inpage: - "Returns webpages containing the specified term either in the title or in the body of the page." I don't understand the point of this operator.
• lang: or language: - for searching pages in a specific language. What comes after needs to be an ISO 639-1 two-letter code, e.g. lang:es for Spanish. See www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php for a list.
• site: - for searching pages in a specific website, e.g. goggles site:brave.com.
• + - it says it "Returns web pages containing the specified term either in the title or the body of the page [...] making sure the keyword [...] appears in the result," however I tried it with +amazing +movie 2022 and the results didn't have the word "amazing," so I'm frankly not sure what it does. Although, to be fair, there are other search engines that have a + operator, and this + operator just never works, no matter what search engine you try.
• - - the minus excludes a term from search results, e.g. best movies -horror.
• "" - surrounding with quotes does exact phrase search, e.g. "bad movies" "best actors".

Discussions search: Brave Search may display a special list of results in the web search that are threads from discussion-focused websites and forums, such as "Reddit and the StackExchange network"².

Image search: Brave Search has its own image index as well, so you can search for images on the web.

News search: Brave Search has a tab that shows only news articles as results.

Video search: Brave Search has a tab that shows only videos as results, such as from Youtube.

Goggles: Brave Search has an unique feature called "goggles" that allows users and communities to change how results are ranked by boosting certain results or removing (discarding) websites from the results entirely. I assume this is similar to what Kagi provides as a paid feature to individuals. When I checked it, the following "goggles" were shown for me to pick:

1. Tech blogs
2. Hacker News / 1k short
3. News from the Left
4. News from the Right
5. No Pinterest
6. Rust programming
7. Copycats removal
   (removes websites that copies answers from StackOverlow, etc.)
8. 1k short
   (removes top 1000 websites)

You can tell from these goggles the sort of person that is the target audience of Brave Search, an alternative search engine focused on privacy: tech enthusiasts who love Rust and hate Pinterest, which makes sense considering the average person wouldn't stop using mainstream search engines as easily as a tech enthusiast would.

Missing Features

Some features that you may find in other search engines but not in Brave Search include:

No reverse image search: although Brave Search appears to have its own image index, it doesn't provide reverse image search functionality.

No image search filters: there seems to be no way to filter images by their size, color, or format. I thought maybe the operator filetype:gif would work, but it didn't, either. That does return GIFs sometimes, but it's because it ignores the filetype: part and just adds gif to the query. Same with ext:.

Observations

Proof-of-work captcha: Brave Search uses proof-of-work (PoW) as a mean to tell whether you're a real person accessing the website or a bot abusing their services³. Proof-of-work essentially means a computer program wastes your electricity, deliberately, to prove that you can afford that electricity being wasted. I'm not really sure how this would stop a bot, to be honest. Perhaps if you had 1 million bots searching for things every second it would be expensive? I'm not sure how much electricity that would cost.

Anonymous user agent: Brave Search's bot (BraveBot? BraveSearchBot?) appears to have no official name of its own. It uses the same user agent (i.e. it self-identifies) as Google's GoogleBot in order to avoid being discriminated against by webmasters⁴.

Tech & Politics: personally, I find it very disheartening that the default goggles offered were entirely about technology and programming, and U.S. politics. A search engine is the gateway to the rest of the web, so I think if you offer a feature like this, you should just put some cool websites about all sorts of hobbies in there, like cooking, gardening, board games, and that sort of thing. In particular, I extremely dislike having the words "News from the Left" and "News from the Right" thrown at my face. I think these should be at the bottom of the list. I was having a good time until I saw them. Now I'm just sad.

Reference

1. https://safe.search.brave.com/help/operators (accessed 2024-04-29) ↩︎
2. https://search.brave.com/help/discussions (accessed 2024-04-29) ↩︎
3. https://safe.search.brave.com/help/pow-captcha (accessed 2024-04-29) ↩︎
4. https://safe.search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler (accessed 2024-04-29) ↩︎