 I've made a video about Brave Browser before and my thoughts on it were meh. I didn't really understand it, I didn't really care for it all that much, basically the way I thought about it was that it's basically Google Chrome with a little bit better privacy and some added on crypto nonsense. Now everyone who knows me knows that I'm not into cryptocurrency at all, I may be poorer for it, but I just don't really get it. So the cryptocurrency add on to Brave Browser just has never been interesting for me. So when I heard that Brave was going to come out with its own search engine, I was mostly unimpressed because there have been many tries over the last 20 years to become the next Google or to be a more privacy focused search engine or to even just be a good search engine and almost every single one of them have been complete and utter failures. I mean you name it, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, I mean Yahoo was around before Google but they still tried to compete with Google and lost. I mean every alternative search engine you have around nowadays can just not compete with Google in terms of quality or in terms of mind share. So the question is what chance does Brave have and recently Brave brought their search or their Brave search out into beta. So before I even begin to take a look at this, we'll just say that this isn't beta, hopefully it gets better as it goes on and when it comes out of beta than it is right now that would be good. But also just know that I will take a look at this again when it does come out of beta so we can kind of compare the search results as it gets better. So let's go ahead and take a look at Brave search and see what it's all about and see if I continue to be very down on the Brave company. So this is Brave search in the Brave browser. I recently switched to Brave because Firefox crapped out on me which is very disappointing but that's another story for another day. But this is the Brave search and like I said it is in beta so I will try, I will attempt and probably not succeed in actually being fairly objective and keeping in mind that this is a beta. And I've used this a little bit before I made this video so I have thoughts in my head that are going to interfere with my quest of being an objective observer of their search. But we'll see how it goes. So right off the bat it very much looks like a search engine. I mean there's nothing special here. Up here in the corner we have some options for dark theme which is you know an improvement on Google because Google you can't actually go through and do a dark theme without having like a plugin or something. You can choose to open links in your tab. You can set through the thing in default and basically that's it, it gives you a little bit of like search results stats, tells you how much of the search results are from the Brave index and so on and so forth. You know it's nice. There are some more settings up here if we click on this it allows you to change your units of measure, anonymous local results, anonymous usage metrics. These are basically things that will allow you that will send metrics back to the Brave search in order to improve Brave. I don't mind that being there as long as it's actually anonymized which is definitely not in a Google search so that's okay with me. For queries where Brave search is not yet refined your browser will automatically check Google for the same query, mix the results for you and send their query data back to us so we can improve Brave search for everyone. That's kind of cool. I have to admit. Now I believe DuckDuckGo does something similar and I know there are like services like start page that also has like a mixture of Google results might actually just be a front end for Google you know anyways but this is kind of actually cool. It's not on by default which is also the setting that you want because you don't want to send that information to Google without people's permission so that's good. So those are the settings. Let's go ahead and go back here and then all that's really left to do is to search for something. So the obvious choice here is to search for the Linux Cast. And as you can see fail. Now this is not a big deal. It's not as if the Linux Cast is this huge monolith that it should get right. But it should be somewhere on the first page right. You'd think that the Linux Cast being on a YouTube channel should be somewhere on the first page. It's not. It's not. Okay. Again. Oh wait a minute. Hold on a second. I lied. Thelinuxcast.com. This is going to be like a landing page for a previous like the site has been blocked by break. I don't even own that domain anymore. I used to own that domain. So that's interesting. So it is on the first page. Congratulations. It's really far down now. And it's not even the right link. It should go to the YouTube page again. Not a great test because I mean really nobody knows about the Linux Cast anyways but let's go ahead and search for a well-known YouTuber. Let's search for DistroTube. Okay. We do get him right up the top and we even get hit Derrick's GitLab. We get like the first search we get him on Odyssey. So apparently once you reach a certain point in terms of subscribers you know you do actually get ranked here. This Twitter account is not his by the way. So just keep that in mind. That Macedon is his. Okay. So DistroTube worked. What else can we use to stump this? I'm trying to remember one of the searches that I did earlier. So one of my things that I use on GitHub is DWMricer is something that I created. Surprisingly enough my friend Terminal for Life comes up number one on this one. I believe maybe because he's forked that repository maybe. I don't know possibly but other than that here we actually get the Linux Cast, the actual podcast on Apple, Apple Podcasts even though that's not what I don't think I've ever actually mentioned DWMricer. Wait a minute. I did actually mention DWMricer in this one. I use it as a pick of the week. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. I found that but I didn't actually find the GitHub. Okay. So that's another one. Again, not that big of a deal because it's just a thing that I created. Let's search for something a little bit, a lot more popular. So BSPWM, this should show up right good and it does right at the top. It also shows you, it takes you to the ArchWiki and all this stuff. This is all good stuff here. Now let's search for something very, very popular. Let's search for breaking mention. Okay. This is one of my favorite bands. And then this is actually what we'll see when you search for something really popular. You actually do get a card similar to what you'd get in Google. That's really cool. It has all their social media profiles and so on and so forth. It actually works really well. Now the amount of times you actually get a card I've found have been somewhat lacking but again this is beta. So I'm assuming that that kind of stuff will actually get filled out as we go along. So if I wanted to search for lyrics, let's just see how the lyrics things because if you search for lyrics on Google, you actually get the lyrics and there's been a lot of pushback from the companies and websites actually do lyrics that Google kind of scrapes them and then nobody ever actually visits their site. So let's just search for sticking with breaking Benjamin. We'll do this. We'll see if we get lyrics and we'll also search for lyrics. So we don't actually get the lyrics but we just get links to them which is okay. It's probably the best way to avoid legal trouble but that's just one thing that I notice, okay. So overall thoughts, I mean obviously I can sit here and just do searches over and over again and I probably will go ahead and make Brave search my default search for a little while and see how it goes and then when it does come out of beta I will have used it for a while and can report back to you guys to see how well it goes. I would love to know in the comments below if you're interested in actually trying this out. Personally, I think DuckDuckGo does better search results but I got to remember DuckDuckGo has been around for a lot longer and I believe they pull a lot of stuff from Bing. So Bing probably has better search results, you know, whatever. It'll be interesting to see how this improves over time. So that was a real quick video. Let me know in the comments below if you're interested in trying Brave search. You can do so at search.brave.com. I believe everybody can get to it no matter what browser you use but I'm not sure about that. I just happened to have been using Brave, the Brave browser anyways. So anyways, leave those in the comments below. Thank you for watching. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons Devon, Marcus, Megalyn, Donnie Sven, East Coast Web, Merrick, Camp and Mitchell. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.