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.)
Brave Search is now frequently beating DDG and Startpage for accuracy of search results. It's like using Google 10 years ago when it was actually good but without the ads, tracking and pestering to "log in". Good stuff.
DDG, Google, bing, starypage (which uses bing / Google I believe) are all god awful and getting worse by the day.
The only one worth a damn is kagi. And it costs money.
I talked at the idea of paying for a search engine at first but the peace of mind that comes with not being tracked by an out of control hunter seeker dumpster fire is worth it.
Kagi is easily the greatest search engine I've ever used, no exaggeration, the results are just consistently so good, I love all of its features too, like the tracker detection and details on results. I just wish it was cheaper, its really hard for me to justify paying $10 a month for a search engine. If it was cheaper, I'd buy it in a heart beat. Just been using Brave Search in combination with DDG for the time being. Brave Search's CAPTCHAs just drive me nuts, been running into them a lot lately for some reason, that's my biggest problem with it, especially how they require WASM to be enabled every time which is a security risk too.
Brave has been great. There have been barely any times where I had to switch to Google because I didn't find something, whereas this happened with DDG quite regularly.
DDG has one upside with the bang operators making searching something very easy via other search engines
Well, usually that happens when Americans come it. They freaking love to add politics to anything. Since they are mostly leftist, they bash anything they don't like out of the sake of doing so. Brave is great, I have been using its search engine from the beginning and the browser when Blink engine is enforced, and I cannot use Firefox.
US politics is considered quite conservative, actually. The Democratic Party certainly isn't "leftist" by anything other than warped American standards.