Brave Search is a search engine created by the same company that makes the Brave Browser.
The search results from Brave are a mixture of Bing results with other results generated by Brave’s index.
The company says they anonymously check Brave’s search results against third-party results and mix them on the results page. Additionally, an option exists to include Google results anonymously.
For the sake of transparency, Brave provides a “Results Independence” metric. This anonymous calculation shows the percentage of search results that come from Brave versus these third parties.
Additionally, Brave relies on Bing for most image and video results. However, even when using these external results, the Brave search engine still preserves user privacy, according to the Frequently Asked Questions page.
Brave is obviously focused on what appears to be the privacy obsessed user. I am not sure if this model is ever going to gain a lot of users anymore then other privacy focused browsers like Firefox. Chrome still very popular as well as Google Search. Even Bing holds more user marketshare than all the other search engines. I guess there is a small demand for privacy but I don’t think its that useful for the internet. Searches especially need some user info to return better results. It’s why Google search is so popular.
I agree that search engine results can be improved with user data. That’s why I recommend private services like Neeva and Kagi, where your preferences and customizations are kept private. See this article for more information.