I don’t think this should be downvoted. Brave Search is one of the very few search engines that is building its own index.
DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both great, however DDG uses results from Bing and Startpage uses results from Google.
We need proper competition against these big tech giants, and Brave Search is one of the few alternatives which is attempting to provide it. Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index.
Yeah, I believe that the common consensus here on Lemmy is that Brave is ran by an A-hole and shouldn't be supported. Secondly it's hated for injecting it's own ads and tracking into things aswell as the whole crypto thing.