Brave’s Search Engine Can Now Find Images
Brave, a privacy-focused search engine, has incorporated images and videos for the first time but users won’t have to worry about being profiled for the pictures they search.
Brave will still allow users to look for images on competitor search engines but they can now view images and video from Brave’s own index.
Brave had been giving users the option to redirect to Bing or Google but noted that this was not popular with some of its users.
“This was a temporary decision to help users find results with minimum hassle, while we worked to offer a sustainable, privacy-preserving, and independent image and video search option,” writes Brave in a press release.
What is Brave Search?
Developed by Brave Software, Brave Search was released in Beta in March 2021. It uses its own independent index to generate search results but also allows users to anonymously check Google for the same query.
The company says that Brave Search is “100 percent private and anonymous.”
“Web content searches make up the majority of all search engine results, while image/video search has become fragmented, due to the exponential growth of visual content on the Internet,” says Brave.
“Increasingly, users are using their favorite social and content platforms to discover visual content—but this comes at a significant cost to user privacy.”
Other privacy-centric web browsers such as DuckDuckGo rely mostly on Bing’s API for its image results. This, Brave says, is an issue.
“Two years ago, Microsoft Bing was found to serve zero image results for the Tiananmen Square Tank Man,” says Brave.
“This obviously affected third-party services—such as DuckDuckGo—that rely entirely on Bing’s API for their search results. But it also affected Brave Search because — at the time — we were relying on Bing for image search results. This created both a technical dependency, and also an unintended extension of Big Tech’s censorship.”
Engadget notes that Brave stopped using Bing’s search index in May and while that cut seven percent of results it gives the company more control over its listings.
Brave says that because its image results come directly from Brave Search’s independent index then they will avoid “Big Tech censorship.”
