Brave Search launches own image and video search

The major problem with Brave search is their position about indexing and licensing content against the wishes of the website publisher. Their robot does not identify itself, meaning the publisher cannot use the standard robots.txt to block its crawling if the publisher so wishes. Incidentally, the robots.txt file has been used in court cases litigating if a search engine is legal or not.<p>Even worse, they state that Brave search won&#x27;t index a page only if other search engines are not allowed to index it. It is morally not their right to make that call. A publisher should have full control to discriminate which search engine indexes the website&#x27;s content. That&#x27;s the very heart of why the Robots Exclusion Protocol exists, and Brave is brazenly ignoring it.<p>Even worse than that, the Brave search API allows you (for an extra fee) to get the content with a &quot;license&quot; to use the content for AI training? Who allowed them the right to distribute the content that way?<p>I wrote about all this here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;crawlers-search-engines-generative-ai-companies-429389" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;crawlers-search-engines-generat...</a><p>and more references elsewhere in this thread:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36989129">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36989129</a><p>Amusingly, while I was writing my article, this got posted to their forums, asking about how to block their crawler:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.brave.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;stop-website-being-shown-in-brave-search&#x2F;495774" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.brave.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;stop-website-being-shown-in-br...</a><p>No reply so far.

As far as I can tell, that makes for 5 independent image search engines on the web:<p><pre><code> Baidu Bing Brave Google Yandex </code></pre> You can compare their results on this search comparison page I maintain:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnod.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;?engines=p,o,br,n,q&amp;nw=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnod.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;?engines=p,o,br,n,q&amp;nw=1</a><p>(If you want to also search image libraries like Flickr and Pexels, click on &quot;more engines&quot; to select all places you want to search)

I&#x27;m very glad for this! I&#x27;ve been using Brave search almost since it launched, and the standard results have gotten great, but it&#x27;s always been a bummer to have to go out to Bing&#x2F;Google for images&#x2F;video. It&#x27;s really nice having an alternative that isn&#x27;t just wrapper around someone else&#x27;s search index.

I&#x27;m always staying away from Brave because I&#x27;ve been confronted so many times with bait-and-switch tactics that I have the feeling that one day they will move away from being good and monetize all the collected data, even though they don&#x27;t collect data.<p>I&#x27;m so skeptical that I&#x27;m just now starting to develop a feeling of trust towards DuckDuckGo.<p>In the browser domain, Mozilla is the only company of which I feel that it is genuinely pro-customer.<p>So I give all my stuff to Google and hope that they at least just protect it from hackers, while I am aware that they analyze my data in order to see how they can monetize me better, but at least with anonymity in regards to 3rd parties. I just hope I&#x27;m not wrong.

That makes two companies who both maintain their own Chromium forks and run direct competitors to core Google search products. I wonder if we&#x27;ll see Google start to close off open development on Chrome - Microsoft will likely be fine, but that could put Brave in a precarious position.

No mention of reverse image search sadly. I&#x27;ve been looking for anything better than Google&#x2F;yandex forever.

Also reported here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;03&#x2F;brave_cuts_ties_with_bing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;03&#x2F;brave_cuts_ties_with_...</a>

That&#x27;s awesome! I&#x27;ve been using Brave Search for years and it&#x27;s my favorite search engine ever!

My priority for search is that it’s free of political censorship and weighting. Google is abysmal on this issue, then we had the DDG CEO on here making excuses for his very clear statements about Russian news sources. I don’t need or want anyone else to decide for me what qualifies as “misinformation” I will decide that for myself.<p>It surprisingly comes up for image searching. Google for example has been known to censor images of Tiananmen Square.

Very nice!<p>(though I&#x27;ve recently switched away from Brave Search since the goggles subscriptions (the reason I&#x27;ve switched to Brave) have a big bar right at the top and the whole top settings+goggles shifts search results on load!)

Very nice! I just switched to Brave Search from DDG on Brave and I kind of like it.<p>Now... I would just like to see the full https url on searches.<p>I already love the look, Brave summarizer AI and general results!

I like Brave and trust Brendan Eich, but what happens when they cash out and the next owners decide to monetize all this data?<p>The current policies don&#x27;t allow it, sure. But then there will be gradual changes to those policies, and all sorts of dark patterns that make 99% of users leak their data (think &quot;enabled by default but opt-out&quot;).<p>Is there any guarantee against this?

Good, but we need more alternative search engines, even very niche ones.

Excellent news. Now to see how well it holds up.

I wish brave (and everyone else on the internet) would abandon the poppins font it&#x27;s nauseating.

I&#x27;d appreciate if it&#x27;d possible to select Czech Republic and Ukraine as regions for search.

When will Brave Search launch a crawler update that lets me specifically block its crawler in robots.txt like every other search engine supports?