Brave’s New Tool – Goggles, Allows You to Create and Share Your Own Search Rankings

Brave believes it can help you with your fear of traditional web search engines being biased. The company has released a beta Goggles feature for Brave Search (which is no longer a beta) that allows anybody to specify their own search ranking criteria. For example, you may filter a “politics” inquiry to focus on blogs rather than big news sites.

Simply doing a search and pressing the “Goggles” button allows you to create, modify, or use other people’s ranks. You won’t have to spend as much time fine-tuning your results. A community might also exchange Goggles to better surface the sites it visits most frequently.

Brave is positioning the tool as a counter-argument to the algorithms used by Google and Microsoft’s Bing to highlight some search results while trying to downplay others. Those more popular search firms claim to be focused on trustworthy sources of information and otherwise supporting users in finding valuable stuff, but Brave believes Goggles may help fight biases present in the technology of its larger competitors.

As a result, the feature may have both pros and negatives. While this may make it easier to uncover smaller sites or differing views that are typically hidden in traditional search results, it may also promote inner thoughts in which you only see content that agrees with your existing beliefs. You may need to use Goggles carefully, like with the rest of the internet, to prevent establishing an isolated situation.