[proxyforce]

After a long period of relative dominance by a single provider, there’s recently been a lot of interesting things happening in the search space. Specifically around privacy, there are multiple projects and companies working to offer us control how (and whether) our search activity is captured and monetized. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch — companies providing search services need to monetize SOMEHOW, and I think that’s the key thing to pay attention to when evaluating new services.

Brave’s approach seems to be to straddle the line a bit between free and paid — the article says there will be an option to pay for a completely ad-free version of the Brave Search service, while also having a free option that is ad supported (albeit via the unique BAT model).

It’s exciting to see these types of services starting to become available. Competition and user choice in search is a good thing for everyone involved.

Disclaimer: I work at Neeva[1], a subscription based never-any-ads search engine. These opinions are my own.

[1] https://www.neeva.com