BRAVE SEARCH FULL

Though clearly not in the same profit league as Apple. (Albeit, Apple extracts massive payments from Google to preload the latter’s search engine onto iOS devices - which does conflict with its wider, pro-privacy, pro-user promises while also adding a nice revenue boost for Apple… ).ĭuckDuckGo has, by contrast, been at the nontracking search coalface for years - and turning a profit since 2014. Still, even Apple doesn’t try to compete against Google search, which perhaps underlines the scale of the challenge involved in trying to poach users from the search behemoth. Tl dr: The market for privacy consumer tech is growing.

(At the start of this year Apple said there are now over 1 billion iOS users globally - and more than 1.65 billion Apple devices.) There is also Apple itself too, of course - a Big Tech giant that competes with Google and the adtech complex by promising users a privacy premium to drive sales of its hardware and services. The latter recently confirmed passing 50 million users globally.

BRAVE SEARCH FULL

And several players which started out with a strong focus on one particular pro-privacy product (such as a browser, search engine or email) have been expanding into a full suite of products - all under the same nontracking umbrella.Īs well as Brave, there’s the likes of DuckDuckGo - which offers nontracking search but also a tracker blocker and an email inbox protector tool, among other products, and reckons it now has between 70 million-100 million users overall and Proton, the maker of E2E-encrypted email service ProtonMail but also a cloud calendar and file storage as well as a VPN. Growing public awareness of surveillance-based business models has been building momentum for pro-privacy consumer tech for a number of years. The company recently passed 32 million monthly active users (up from 25 million back in March) for its wider suite of products - which, as well as its flagship pro-privacy browser, includes a news reader ( Brave News) and a Firewall+VPN service.īrave also offers privacy-preserving Brave Ads for businesses wanting to reach its community of privacy-preferring users.īrave is launching its own search engine with the help of ex-Cliqz devs and tech It’s made this video ad to tout its “all in one” alternative to Google search + Chrome. The (now beta) search engine has been tested by more than 100,000 “early access users” at this point, per Brave. But Brave says it will make it the default search in its browser later this year.Īs we reported back in March, the company acquired technology and developers who had previously worked on Cliqz, a European anti-tracking search-browser combo which closed down in May 2020 - building on a technology they’d started to develop, called Tailcat, to form the basis of the Brave-branded search engine. It can also be reached from other browsers via - so doesn’t require switching to Brave’s browser to use.īrave Search is being offered as one of multiple search options that users of the company’s eponymous browser can pick from (including Google’s search engine). Users interested in checking out Brave’s nontracking search engine, which is built on top of an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance tech products like Google search, will find it via Brave’s desktop and mobile browsers. Pro-privacy browser Brave, which has been testing its own brand search engine for several months - operating a waitlist where brave (ha!) early adopters could kick the tyres of an upstart alternative in internet search - has now launched the tool, Brave Search, in global beta.

Brave search