Brave Search
Brave (tweet, Hacker News):
Today Brave announced the acquisition of Tailcat, the open search engine developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz, a holding of Hubert Burda Media. Tailcat will become the foundation of Brave Search. Brave Search and the Brave browser constitute the industry’s first independent, privacy-preserving alternative to Google Chrome and Google Search, which rely on tracking users across sites and have 70 percent and 92 percent market share, respectively.
Under the hood, nearly all of today’s search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies. In contrast, the Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect, but without compromising their privacy. Tailcat does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to improve search results.
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We will provide options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search.
Putting aside the question of whether any non-Google search engine provides good enough search results to replace Google as Safari’s default — a huge question! — if Apple were to make such a move in the name of privacy, it almost certainly would come as a multi-billion dollar annual hit to the company’s Services revenue.
Previously:
Makes you wonder if there’s a middle ground.
What if macOS Safari defaulted differently?
What if, you know, to “fight monopoly claims for the consumer”, iOS Safari randomly selected from three search engines on first launch? How many users would swap to Google immediately (and doesn’t Apple still get paid?) and how many would never know the difference?