The Web Discovery Project is a privacy-preserving way for you to contribute to the growth and independence of Brave Search. If you opt in, you’ll contribute some anonymous data about searches and web page visits made within the Brave Browser (including pages arrived at via some, but not all, other search engines). This data helps build the Brave Search independent index, and ensure we show results relevant to your search queries. By “data” we mean search queries, search result clicks, the URLs of pages visited in the browser, time spent on those pages, and some metadata about the pages themselves.

The Web Discovery Project runs in the background, so it requires no effort on the part of contributors. Data contributed cannot be linked back to whoever contributed it, or grouped together, which prevents deanonymization attempts. Opt out at any time.

Why we built the Web Discovery Project

Providing relevant search results is essential to building a search engine people want to use. It’s how we create a private search engine that still competes with big tech on quality and completeness. To ensure search results are as relevant as possible, Brave needs to understand some key things, including:

• How closely search results match the search keywords (matching to exact words, parts of words, or synonyms)
• How recent searches are for those keywords
• How often a search result is clicked for a given keyword
• How popular search keywords are
• What pages are popular or novel
• Which sites only allow crawling by the Google search bot

Ensuring relevance also means reducing the “noise” from web content that makes a search less relevant. For example, if you search for “Europe weather” and see results relating to European history or European business, you would say the results are less relevant to your query. Learning through the Web Discovery Project enables Brave Search to filter this noise out, but in a privacy-preserving way. Making search more relevant shouldn’t come at the expense of your online privacy.

Context

Most search providers—like Google and Microsoft—collect data about your search behavior, both in the search engine and the browser (like Chrome or Edge). This data includes your queries, what search results you click, the URLs of the pages you visit, time spent on those pages, and metadata (such as page title, content-type, etc) about the pages themselves. Other, non-independent search engines (like DuckDuckGo) don’t necessarily collect data themselves. But they still rely on this kind of collection via their dependence on other big tech indexes (like Bing). And this data can—and often is—associated with you personally.

Search providers collect this kind of data to continuously grow their indexes—the list of billions of web pages they draw from to deliver results—and ensure results are relevant and never stale. This collection isn’t inherently bad. But it’s shortcomings become apparent when you look at Brave’s alternative way:

• The Web Discovery Project allows you to contribute anonymous, generalized data.
• The Web Discovery Project is designed to prevent us from associating this data with you. This means there’s no data for Brave to sell to advertisers, or lose to theft or hacking, allowing us to promise through technology rather than words.
• Brave’s Web Discovery Project is opt-in only, and totally transparent.

The protection of unlinkability

Brave doesn’t follow the sneaky practices of other big tech search engines. The Web Discovery Project is opt-in, and the data collected under the Web Discovery Project has specific protections to ensure anonymity. In addition to these protections, the Web Discovery Project adheres to the principle of “unlinkability.” This means we do not link data to you, your browser, or your device. Brave Search has no concept of a user or session ID, which prevents record linkability. Further, the Web Discovery Project includes multiple protections to prevent websites or searches specific to you, or that include personal or sensitive information, from inclusion.

What keywords are being searched most often? What websites do those keywords lead to? How are those websites interacted with? These kinds of directional questions help Brave Search navigate the world of available web pages, and separate signal from noise. And this, in turn, helps us understand the parts of the web worth indexing for users.