Privacy-focused browser startup Brave is infusing artificial intelligence into Brave Search to create a real-time answer engine. The move follows what others have done, including Google's Search Generational Experience and Gemini, Microsoft's Bing Copilot and Perplexity AI. However, what helps Brave stand apart is its privacy-first approach, which guided the company to build its Answer with AI features without using Google's or Microsoft's search engines.
"With the new Brave Search and its integration of Answer with AI, users get the best of both worlds: One place to get generative answers as well as up-to-date links, providing instant and highly relevant results," Bravel Chief of Search Josep Pujol says in a statement.
Available for free to everyone on desktop and mobile, Brave's Answer with AI primarily supports English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The company explains that while its answer engine functionality is available in other languages, responses may appear in English.
Brave claims its AI can provide answers based on multiple intents a user might have, of which they fall into one of a handful of categories:
Navigational: Queries for specific sites, such as “Facebook” or “Twitter"
Informational: For those seeking information that is either built around structured real-time information (e.g., currency conversion rates, weather, or sports results) or is question-like (e.g., "How do I find north when hiking?")
Commercial: Queries aimed at finding or researching products and services
Transactional: Queries intending to complete an action (e.g., buying a product)
Brave's Answer with AI can be triggered by tapping the icon alongside the search bar. Answers generated will not be just text-based either. Responses can be a mixture of text with other media types, including informational cards and images — similar to what you'd see on a Google results page.
"Wide-scale search engines have undergone many iterations: directory listings, ten blue links, query-dependent snippets, knowledge graphs and featured snippets," Pujol shares. "The Brave Search Answer with AI feature evolves this paradigm. An answer engine is a system that tries to answer a question rather than point to websites about the question. Thanks to the proliferation and quality of large language models (LLMs), search-integrated answer engines are now a possibility at scale."
Implementing AI into its search engine is an obvious step for Brave to remain competitive against Microsoft and Google and Pujol admits it. On the other hand, its advantage rests in the company's execution. "Brave is different more on the how than on the what," he tells VentureBeat. "Brave offers choice and competition to a market dominated by Big Tech. Brave also offers strong and time-proven privacy standards. We do not collect user queries or create sessions or profiles in any shape or form."
Pujol acknowledges AI's impact on search traffic but says Brave intends to be a good partner with publishers. "Brave already goes further than most answer engines by directly attributing sources in its synthesized answers." He said that this problem "cannot be fixed by a single entity, particularly one that has a relatively small market share such as Brave."
Answer with AI isn't Brave's first use of the technology. It has an AI assistant called Leo built into its browser — which added support for Mixtral 8x7B this year — and uses machine learning to power its ad platform. In 2023, it also introduced Summarizer for Brave Search, a tool generating instant answers to user queries sans third-party data sources.
The company says while the Brave Search answer engine is free to all users, a paid option with premium experiences could be made available in the future.