How to use Brave Search: an overview

Brave Search is the fastest growing independent search engine. People choose Brave Search for its privacy protections, the fact its totally independent of Big Tech, and for its innovative search tools. In this article, well give a brief overview of how Brave Search works, and highlight some of its core features.

The basics of navigating Brave Search

On the surface, Brave Search works much like any other search engine youre used to.

1. Navigate to search.brave.com.
   • If Brave Search is already your default, simply start typing your query in your browsers address bar.
   • If Brave Search is not your default, learn how to set it in https://search.brave.com/default.
2. Input your search query into the search box.

Once you search, youll land on a familiar-looking results page. From here, you can navigate through multiple pages of results, or filter by:

• Images, News, or Videos using the built-in buttons (or even Goggles, which well talk more about later)
• Geographical region (you can also enable anonymous local results based on your IP address, or a location that you set manually)
• How recently the result was published

If the results dont meet your expectations for any reason, please help us improve Brave Search by clicking the Settings gear icon in the upper right corner of your search results page, and then clicking Share feedback.

[Brave Search feedback screenshot]

You can, of course, also [set Brave Search as your default search engine] (/default) and access it directly from your browsers address bar.

What sets Brave Search apart

Brave Search is distinguished by three main characteristics: privacy, independence, and feature innovation.

Privacy

Brave Search is private by default, meaning it doesnt collect personal information about you, your device or your searches. It also doesnt collect, store, or transmit information that could be used to profile you, track you, or learn anything about you. Read the Brave Search privacy policy.

Independence

Brave Search is built on its own independent search index. It doesnt rely on Big Tech companies like Bing to power its search enginebut all other popular private or neutral search engines do. The result: no Big Tech dependencies, and no editorializing to bias or censor results. Brave uses anonymous community contributions to refine results, and community-created alternative ranking models (called Goggles) to ensure diversity. Learn more about Brave Search independence.

Features

Brave Search also comes packed with innovative features and search tools. Youll find familiar favorites from other search engines (like search operators and Bangs) and other features that are unique to Brave Search (like Goggles and Discussions)all of which are discussed below.

Search Ads and Search Premium

Like other major search engines, Brave Search is ad-supported. But theres a crucial difference: Brave uses its own private alternative to traditional search ads. Its a way to deliver helpful resultswhich can sometimes be adsall while protecting your privacy.

Brave Search Ads dont rely on tracking, data collection, or user profiling to target users. You have the option to use Brave Search with private ads, or to sign up for ad-free Search Premium.

Brave Search features and how to use them

In general, Brave Search looks and feels much like other popular search engines, so theres no learning curve. There are a handful of features that youve likely come to expect from other search engines that are all available in Brave Search, as well as some Brave-specific innovations:

Search operators

Brave Search includes basic syntax tools, or operators, to augment search results. Some of the most popular search operators include:

• Quotation marks to search for an exact word or phrase (e.g. Sony camera parts "DCR VX1000")
• - to eliminate results that include a particular word or phrase (e.g. office -microsoft)
• + to return results that include a particular word or phrase (e.g. eagle +golf)

[Brave Search operators screenshot]

Learn about all the supported Brave Search operators and how to use them.

Bangs

Bangs are handy shortcuts that can quickly take you to another websites results, or filter results quickly from desired sources. Simply type the Bang into your search query (e.g. !r first tennis racket for results from Reddit, or !a first tennis racket for results from Amazon).

[Brave Search bangs screenshot]

Bangs are an easy, innovative way to filter results on a per-query basis. Learn more about how to use Bangs.

Goggles

Goggles let you customize your search engine results pages (SERPs) according to your own rules or filters. Theyre openly developed by the community of Brave Search users, so you can select Goggles from the list that people have published, or create your own. Some popular Goggles include News from the Left, News from the Right, and Tech blogsall of which boost the type of content they describe.

[Brave Search Goggles screenshot]

To use Goggles:

1. Click Goggles on any Brave Search results page (or visit https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover).
2. Choose from one of the popular Goggles displayed, or click Show more.
3. Follow any particular Goggles youd like to easily access from the Goggles button on SERPs.
4. Dont see what you need? You can always create your own Goggles.

Learn more about Goggles.

Discussions

Brave Search Discussions detect discussion-worthy topics. If a query or topic is deemed discussion-worthy, Brave Search will automatically source additional results from forums (like Reddit or StackExchange) and display those in search results.

[Brave Search discussions screenshot]

Learn more about Discussions.

AI in Brave Search

In addition to those features described above, Brave Search also offers some built-in AI experiences:

Summarizer

Braves AI Summarizer provides concise answers at the top of Brave Search results pages, in response to your input, solely based on Web search results. And unlike other AI experiences, the Brave Search Summarizer cites its sources.

[Brave Search AI summarizer screenshot]

Learn more about The Summarizer, and Braves philosophy behind integrating AI into search.

Snippets

Snippets provide richer information (like locations, lists, direct answers, featured descriptions, etc.) in a preview format at the top of search results pages. Snippets content is generated from the Brave Search index, as well as through an AI model (Summarizer) that analyzes pages and extracts the most relevant snippet of text that answers your question.

[Brave Search featured snippets screenshot]

Learn more about Snippets in Brave Search.

Get started with Brave Search

Brave Search is built off a truly independent index, and supports our vision of a user-first Web. It prioritizes privacy and independence, as we continue to innovate and build new features that redefine Web search. Visit search.brave.com to get started.