Brave Software, maker of the Brave web browser, has tuned its search engine to run on a homegrown index of images and videos in an effort to end its dependency on "Big Tech" rivals.
On Thursday, the biz said image and video results from Brave Search – available on the web at search.brave.com and via its browser – will be served from Brave's own index.
Search indexes are made by visiting online resources – typically web pages, images, videos, or other files – with a crawler bot and recording the locations of these resources in a database. And when an internet user submits a query to a search engine, the search engine checks its index (and possible other sources) to find the addresses of resources that correspond to the query keywords. There's actually a lot more to it but that's the basic idea.
Ranking matches from the list in such a way that the search user sees results ordered by predicted relevance is an ongoing computer science challenge, one that Google handled effectively for years with the help of its PageRank algorithm and other machinations. And it continues to dominate the US search market, with more than 90 percent market share in June, according to Similarweb.
But in recent years, there has been growing sentiment that Google Search is getting worse. Part of the problem is AI content generation, which is being used to create web spam, to the detriment of web users.
Yet AI is also part of the supposed solution, at least for rival Microsoft, which sees OpenAI's chatbot tech as a way to rewrite the expectations for web search at Google's expense.