It remains to be seen how much of a dent any of these rivals can make in Google’s dominance – or if they actually need to if they’re going to succeed. Further competition comes from Neeva, built by former Google engineers who plan to use a search subscription model You.com, which is in an early testing phase and British startup Mojeek, which has crawled more than three billion webpages using its own crawler tech. There have been unconfirmed reports that Apple is building its own search engine, although this could see it lose billions of dollars that Google pays it to be the default search choice on its Safari browser. A filter could also be set to only display results from independent media outlets.Īnd Google might soon have even more competition. People could, for example, use filters to only show product reviews that don’t contain affiliate links. The Brave Search team are also working on filters, called Goggles, that will allow people to create a series of sources where search results are pulled from. “You don't have to crawl the entire web in quasi-real time as Google does.” “It's the web that the users care about,” says Eich. “These allow it to build an index, which Tailcat has done and already did at Cliqz, and it's getting bigger.” He admits that the index will not be anywhere near as deep as Google’s but that the top results it surfaces are largely the same. “What Tailcat does is it looks at a query log and a click log anonymously,” Eich says. Eich says that some users will be given the ability to opt-in to anonymous data collection to help fine-tune search results. The purchase includes an index of the web that’s been created by Tailcat and the technology that powers it.

Instead Brave has purchased Tailcat, an offshoot of German search engine Cliqz, which was owned by Hubert Burda Media and closed down last year. Bing’s own index of the web also helps to provide results in other Google rivals, such as DuckDuckGo which uses it as one of 400 sources that feed into search results.Įich says Brave isn’t starting its search engine or index from scratch and won’t be using indexes from Bing or other tech firms. Globally its nearest rival is Microsoft’s Bing, which has just 2.7 per cent of the market. The depth of Google’s indexing has helped secure its market-leading position.

Brave browser online