Notes 
Blog post about the new Brave Search beta. Based in the US. Launched in June 2021.
Reviewed by Marco Wollank
Brave Search
search.brave.com 4.2 (17)
Rate Brave Search: No account needed
Threat level
Covered
A covered pick. Anyone can use it as a private drop-in, with no setup or know-how. Enough for most people. Threat levels
Our take
Built on Brave’s own independent index rather than reselling Google or Bing, which is the meaningful difference and increasingly rare. It’s closed-source and US-based, and the results, while improving, can still trail Google on obscure or very local queries. Pick Brave Search when you want to actually break the Google/Microsoft duopoly rather than quietly reselling it, and you can tolerate the occasional thinner result page. If you only care about result parity with Google, a proxy like Startpage may frustrate you less.
Website at a glance
search.brave.com
A+ score 115
Strong website security headers
Graded by Mozilla HTTP Observatory, tested 2mo ago
Inspect this site yourself
Measures the security configuration of the tool's own website, not the privacy of the product itself. A strong tool can still score low here.
Brave Search alternatives
Mojeek A crawler-based search engine that provides independent search results using its own index of web pages, rather than using results from other search engines. Based in the UK.…
DuckDuckGo Privacy-focused search engine and mobile browser that blocks trackers and searches without profiling you. Partially open source, based in the US.
Startpage Obtains Google search results while protecting users' privacy. Based in the Netherlands. Launched in 1998.
Qwant French private search engine, EU-hosted, no personal data stored, blending its own index with Bing results.
Kagi Paid, ad-free search engine with no tracking, customizable result ranking, and a small free trial.
SearXNG The actively maintained successor to Searx. Self-hostable, open source metasearch engine. Users can access existing public instances.