Brave said Thursday that it has now completely separated its own search capabilities from Google and Microsoft Bing, allowing any search query within the Brave browser to be searched entirely by Brave itself. Based on the company's previous claim that "Brave Search is 100 percent private and anonymous," the change would mean that Brave Search would now be completely private, regardless of what you now search for. Brave is one of a handful of niche browsers, along with Opera, Vivaldi, Firefox, and more, that address a tiny niche of the browser market that's dominated by Google Chrome, then Microsoft Edge. Until now, Brave's own search engine had crawled the Internet by itself, developing its own database for search queries. But its image and video search had used Bing and Google.

Brave is probably best known among hardcore geeks as one of Chrome's challengers. But for awhile now, the company has offered more than just a privacy-minded browser. A year ago, it launched the beta for a search engine, too--and now, on its first anniversary, Brave Search has hit a milestone of 2.5 billion queries, with a peak of 14.1 million queries in one day. For a nascent search engine, these numbers are big. As Brave claims in a blog post, it's won this achievement faster than Google (who took over a year to meet the same goal), plus run circles around DuckDuckGo. Its privacy-oriented rival took four years to cross the same threshold.

Brave Browser has replaced Google with its own no-tracking privacy-centric Brave Search as the default search engine for new users in five regions. Brave is an open-source Chromium-based browser that focuses on user privacy by automatically blocking ads and tracking scripts and removing the privacy-invasive functions built into Chromium. Historically, Brave used Google as its default search engine when searching from the address bar. However, Google is known for tracking users' activities, behavior, and interests, not making it a good fit for a privacy-centric browser. Today, Brave announced that their privacy-focused Brave Search has now become the default search engine for new users in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Brave is very confident in its privacy-centric search engine -- so much so that it's giving Google the boot. As of today (October 19th), Brave will use the engine as its browser's default search tool, replacing Google in the US, UK and Canada. Your browser will keep its existing search engine settings, and you can always pick Google or another competitor if you're so inclined. The change in defaults is available across desktop releases as well as Android and iOS. Brave Search is effectively billed as the anti-Google engine.

Google's grip on the web has never been stronger. Its Chrome web browser has almost 70 percent of the market and its search engine a whopping 92 percent share. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. But Google's dominance is being challenged. Regulators are questioning its monopoly position and claim the company has used anticompetitive tactics to strengthen its dominance.

Browser privacy is a big deal, as Google and other companies use your search data to serve you ads while you surf the web. While most users accept that tradeoff, others who believe strongly in maintaining their own data privacy. If you're one of these, Brave Software can help. On Wednesday the company said it's launching a search engine to compete with Google and Bing, with privacy as its first priority. Brave is buying Tailcat, an open search engine, and will add it to what it's calling Brave Search, a forthcoming search engine.

Privacy-focused browser Brave is working on its own search engine. It has bought Tailcat, an open-source engine created by a team who worked on the defunct anti-tracking browser and search engine Cliqz, to power Brave Search. The company will allow others to use Brave Search tech to build their own search engines. Brave says the search engine will provide an alternative to Google Search and Chrome. It's developing Brave Search using the same principles as its browser, which now has more than 25 million monthly active users.