Privacy-focused Brave Search launches image and video search section
Privacy-focused Brave Search launches image and video search section
Privacy-focused Brave Search launches image and video search section
On Aug 03, Brave, maker of a privacy-focused search engine and browser, announced the launch of its own image and video search engine, weaning itself off its reliance on other search providers.
This means users will no longer need to leave Brave when they need image or video search results, as search results will come directly from Brave Search’s own independent index, the company explained.
Prior to this, Brave announced in April that it would no longer use Bing’s index, which used to account for 7% of all query results.
Brave says the image and video search feature has been in development for several months, and its search results will now also be available through the recently launched Brave Search API.
Before its launch, Brave offered an alternative way to search for images or videos by redirecting to Bing or Google, a feature that lets users search in a familiar format while Brave’s own index is being developed.
“We realize that the redirection option is not popular with some users, and thank them for their patience during the transition,” reads a blog post announcing the new Brave feature. “This is a temporary decision to help users find results with the least amount of hassle while we work to provide a sustainable, privacy-preserving, independent search option for images and videos.”
The company noted that the ability to search for images and videos within the Brave ecosystem will allow users to benefit from greater speed and privacy compared to other search engines that rely on third-party providers.
However, the company is also positioning the feature as a means of curbing “big tech censorship.” This affected Brave at the time, as it still relied on Bing for image search results.
The company cautioned that Brave’s image search results are still being improved.
Currently, some advanced filters (such as license type or aspect ratio) are not available out of the box. But the company says those features will be added soon.
The Brave search engine is the default in the company’s own Brave web browser, but is also available standalone at search.brave.com.
