In late April, the independent online search and web browser company Brave Search announced it had ditched using Microsoft's Bing search API for a small percentage of its text search results. However, for searching for images and videos on the internet, Brave did continue to offer users the option to access either Bing or Google, Search as an alternative.
Today, Brave Search is announcing it now has its own independent image and search index. In its announcement today, Brave Search claims that while search engines are used the most to find web content, the ways to find images and video content is more varied. Brave says most people try to find images and videos through social networks. However, it believes these results come at the expense of the privacy of those people.
Brave Search says its index is "100% private and anonymous" and now that extends to finding images and videos on its engine and its web browser. It states:
Image and video search makes Brave Search a more comprehensive search engine while protecting user privacy. With the ability to search for crucial vertical categories such as images and videos directly within Brave, users can now access even more content than before. Additionally, by keeping all searches within the Brave ecosystem, users benefit from increased speed and privacy when compared with the multiple search engines that rely on third-party providers.
In addition, the new image and search index will be included in the recently launched Brave Search API, which can be licensed by third parties.
Brave does have a small caveat to this announcement when it comes to offering the best results from a person's search inquiry:
For all search results—text, image, and video—our goal is to offer a great alternative to Big Tech, one that can compete on both quality and independence and serve the right results all the time. However, if we can’t deliver the right result, we also strive to make it easy and intuitive to continue a search elsewhere. Functionally, this means that certain capabilities (such as advanced filters like license type or aspect ratio) will not be immediately available (but will be soon). For now, we believe offering a clear alternative is more important than complete feature parity.
The new image and video search features are now available at the Brave Search site, and are also available as the default engine in the Brave web browser. The company also has Brave Rewards, which lets users earn tokens when they view ads in the browser. They can be used to purchase gift cards, currencies, or use them to support favorite content creators like Neowin.
