Brave, a privacy-conscious web browser, is developing its own privacy-conscious search engine.

Rather than attempting to revive the Tailcat search engine originally developed for the failed European browser project Cliqz, Brave's founder and CEO Brendan Eich has stated that this search engine will be more private than DuckDuckGo. He stated that it will be private.

"Brave Search was built from scratch and has its own built search index, whereas DDG relies on Bing as the search engine under its hood," Eich told Tom's Guide." Brave Search is the first multi-platform, private, browser/search alternative to Big Tech's platform."

Using Brave Search is not yet available. However, by signing up, you can join a waiting list to become a beta tester.

"We are currently working on the integration and aim to launch a test version within a few weeks. After feedback from early testers, we plan to release Brave Search to the public by summer, if not late spring."

In announcing the Tailcat acquisition, Brave promises that its search engine "will not track or profile users," "will not collect IP addresses," and "will not use personally identifiable information to improve search results."

It "relies on anonymized submissions from the community" as an alternative to the automated web crawlers used by Google and Bing. However, like Brave itself, Brave Search will display its own ads.

"We offer paid search without ads and ad-supported search options," says Brave's announcement. We are working on bringing private ads to search, just as we did for Brave user ads."

We asked what Brave would say to advertisers who want to learn more about the users who view their ads. This sharing of personal and behavioral data made Facebook and Google rich.

Aich, who developed the JavaScript coding language and co-founded Mozilla, hinted that Brave would not go down that path, but did not say so explicitly.

"Our ad buyers already appreciate the tremendous click-through rates and competitive CPMs of Brave ads and sponsored images, and we aim to maintain the same high engagement in future ad offerings," he told us. We're currently thinking about the different search experiences we can offer our users and our advertising partners."

Based on Chromium and fairly cross-compatible with Chrome, Brave officially launched in 2019 after more than three years of development Brave currently has 25 million users.

We can attest that Brave is fast and lightweight, partly because it blocks most ads by default. We can also access the Tor privacy network directly from Brave, making it the easiest way to use Tor.

Like most browsers, Brave's search engine is fixed to Google unless you change your settings, although you can choose from several options. Other choices are Bing, DuckDuckGo, and the European search engines Ecosia, Qwant, and Startpage.

Eich told TechCrunch, "When we are ready, we want to make Brave Search the default engine for Brave."