Brave’s search engine lets you optimize your results

Brave Search has rolled out a new feature that gives you a way to create or apply custom filters that change the way it ranks results. This is called “Goggles” and it can potentially help uncover sources that you can’t find immediately on traditional search engines like Google.

Brave has some demos ready for users today, including those who prioritize posts from smaller tech blogs and filter posts from the 1,000 most-visited sites on the web. There’s also a Goggle to exclude posts from Pinterest—because Brave clearly knows the frustration of trying to find an image and getting Pinterest posts with no sources. Brave says these goggles are for demonstrative purposes only, and developers can expand on or fork over them. It’ll start removing these Goggles once users start coming up with their own, but I expect Pinterest to stick around one.

While Brave says its engine, which is independent of entities like Google and Bing, “does not have editorial bias”, that doesn’t change the fact that all algorithms have inherently biased bias. The goggles are there to reduce it, you essentially have a hand in shaping those biases.

After trying out the feature for myself, I was impressed by how well it actually works. I searched for “Airpods Pro Review” with the “Tech Blog” filter turned on, and a bunch of independent blogs popped up – ledge not found anywhere To compare, I searched for the same thing on Google and saw that ledge Appeared on the first page of the result.

But I was a little disappointed to find that creating your own Goggles isn’t as easy as I thought – here I was thinking you can toggle on a bunch of filters or just enter your own keywords. Well, it turns out that there is some coding involved; Developers can read up on the tool on GitHub. For now, I’ll wait until someone comes up with a Goggle that only lets me view articles from satirical sources.

In addition to launching Goggles, Brave also announced that its search engine is out of beta and has already done 2.5 billion searches in the past year. Brave is quickly becoming the Swiss army knife of search engines (at least in my opinion). It rolled out a new discussion feature in April that began eliminating the need for users to add “Reddit” to the end of their searches — it now displays results from Reddit for relevant inquiries.