Using the company’s own index rather than Bing APIs.
“Brave Search users can now search for images and videos without being redirected to Google or Bing, though some advanced search capabilities are still absent.”
They need to make money somehow, and regardless, all the crypto stuff is actually turned off by default, so criticizing Brave for this makes little sense to me.
I think that's just with Brave browser, not Brave Search. At least, I can't find anything related to crypto in Brave Search settings that are there in Brave Browser (I'm using Firefox with Brave Search).
EDIT: With Brave Search (not using the browser), I'm more concerned that the results are still being curated and some results censored. Whereas using something like Kagi, I can see the results are exactly what I would expect to be served, uncensored and uncurated (i.e. how Google and all the rest used to be before they decided they knew better than us what we wanted to search for.)
EDIT: I just realised my brain got confused between two conversations I was having at the same time. One was this one - the difference between Brave BROWSER and Brave SEARCH. And another one where I was talking about Duck Duck Go curating search results 🤦🏻♀️ Sorry for the confusion!
Curation of results. Yes, you can argue it's for a good reason. My issue is that they curate results based on ideologies at all. If they intentionally downrank some results based on their own beliefs for one thing, how can we trust them not to do it with other things? They weren't exactly transparent about it either.
I just want a search engine that serves me results based on what I have searched for. I can use my own brain to curate out or downrank results I don't want. I'm not interested in a search engine that thinks it knows what's best for me.