The company behind the Brave browser recently published Brave Search, their own search engine. It's another private search engine like DuckDuckGo and Startpage but one of their main selling points is their supposed independent search index. They even call out DuckDuckGo for not having their own index in this marketing chart: "Note: DuckDuckGo is dependent on the Bing search index for its search results". And it's true, Duck commonly uses anonymous Bing results but also has their own crawler DuckDuckBot and lots of other sources.
But! Brave Search also gets some search results from third parties like Bing and Google and they are quite open about it. Every result page has an info button with this information and it is displayed in the settings. The help page for Brave's so called "Google fallback mixing", where Google results are combined with Brave results, even states: "Choosing this option has no effect on your privacy.". So why would using anonymous third-party results be okay for Brave but not for other search engines?
Brave Search is still in beta and apparently they are trying to become fully independent of other search indexes in the future. But why already claim how independent your product is all over the website if it obviously isn't yet? For example, image search is apparently using results from Microsoft Bing. Yet one paragraph later they are bragging about how they don't have to rely on Google and Microsoft. Well, which is it?! By the way, just like no VPN company should claim their service to be 100% private, no search engine company should either. Very specific search queries always have the potential to reveal an identity to Bing or Google, regardless of how anonymous the metadata might be. Brave Search, despite all the "better than the competition" claims, also seems to collect more specific usage data than DuckDuckGo: Stuff like a user's operating system and browser, how often users visit or how often they search each day... These metrics are collected by default and can only be disabled if you notice that THIS isn't the entire settings screen and THIS isn't a headline but a link to the full settings. Then you can scroll down and disable anonymous usage metrics.
Any settings you change here will have to be stored using an (anonymous) cookie while Duck and Startpage are additionally able to store settings encoded in a custom URL instead. The quality of the search results is currently probably similar to DuckDuckGo or even a little better but Google is still unmatched in that regard. The design is appealing and clear, I like the occasional small thumbnails in the results. Brave also has widgets that seem to be the standard in current search engines, like the calculator or a unit converter. I'm not sure where the blatant visual similarities to DuckDuckGo come from though. Brave actually partnered with Duck a few years ago but they are competitors now so it seems unlikely that they would freely share UI elements, design and even text content. For example, the description of image licenses reads extremely similar to Duck's version.
The bang feature from DuckDuckGo to search external websites directly also works in Brave, although it strangely isn't mentioned anywhere on the website. Brave Search hasn't settled on a monetization model yet, they are contemplating an ad-supported model like other private search engines or a paid premium model or both. Honestly, I originally didn't plan this video to be so critical towards Brave Search but the more I've read the marketing material and over-the-top privacy claims, the more sceptical I became. And I'm not a fanboy of DuckDuckGo either, I've voiced a lot of critical opinions about their search in an earlier video, too. I don't doubt that Brave is a lot more private than Bing or Google. Competition in the private search engine market should be good for users, I just don't think Brave Search is unique enough to make an impact.