Brave Acquires Open Search Engine, Tailcat; Breaking Away From Google’s Prying Eyes

Popular privacy-focused web browser Brave has bought out Tailcat, an open search engine, in its efforts to launch a private search engine.

On Wednesday, Brave announced the acquisition of Tailcat, an open search engine that was created by the team that was behind the Cliqz anti-tracking search-browser combo. Cliqz, now defunct, operated under Hubert Burda Media, exited the browser and search space in May last year.

As per the announcement, Tailcat will be used as a base for the much expected Brave Search. The Brave Search will be an inbuilt search engine that is developed to allow private and transparent surfing.

Brendan Eich, Brave co-founder, and CEO explained that the company is focused on launching Brave Search before the end of summer 2021.

“Brave is now working on integrating this technology and making it available to all as Brave Search, first via early access for testers, and then for general availability by this summer.”

At the moment, Brave browser highly depends on a number of external search engines, giving its clients a choice to use popular search engines such as DuckDuckGo that is also privacy-focused, and Startpage, and also the mainstream search engines such as Google. Brave claims that almost “all of today’s search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies.”

On the other hand, Tailcat is developed on top of a fully independent index whereby it will not collect IP addresses and other personal information and data aimed at enhancing the search results. Eich explained that Tailcat engineers have been developing a privacy-focused search engine over the last seven years till Cliqz ceased operations. As part of the acquisition deal, the Cliqz development team will now move to Brave. The dev team is headed by Dr. Josep Pujol, who hailed the deal as a major breakthrough in offering an alternative to the Big Tech dominance.

The acquisition comes days after Brave announced a major achievement in its efforts to enhance its browser adoption. Brave doubled its monthly active client base from 11 to 26 million.