Brave Search, which is an alternative product to Google Search, unveiled a new feature that allows you to create or apply custom filters that will change the way the results are ranked. It’s called “Goggles,” and it could potentially help uncover websites you might not find right away on traditional search engines like Google, Bing and even DuckDuckGo.
The company behind the popular privacy-focused web browser has already prepared a few demos for users to play with, including ones that prioritize posts from smaller tech blogs and filter out posts from the 1,000 most-viewed sites on the web. For instance, you could exclude posts from Pinterest, which is something I would use.
According to Brave, these are just demo Goggles and developers can expand on or fork them. As such, they will be deleted once users start coming up with their own.
Brave prides itself to be independent from Google and Bing, but it too may have some biases in its algorithm. With Goggles, you as a user can remove any biases and get only the results you care about.
The problem, however, may be that Goggle is not easy to use, and some coding will be required. Nothing major, but not something most users will be able to do. Heck, even if they could do it – chances are they will not put in some extra time to customize their search results.
In that sense, perhaps we will get an easier-to-use UI for Brave Goggles in the future that would truly make this cool feature accessible to the majority of users. From where I sit, now it is something mostly developers with spare time will use.
Before I let you go, it is also worth adding that Brave Search is no longer in beta, and has seen 2.5 billion searches within the past year. That is an impressive feat considering today’s search market which is heavily dominated by Google.
Previously, the company launched the Discussions feature that started eliminating the need for users to append “Reddit” to the end of their searches. Next, we would like to see them making those Goggles easier, which — I’m guessing — is not too much to ask.