Brave Search has introduced a new feature Thursday, called Rerank, which allows users to customize search rankings by boosting or removing domains from search results, giving them full control over their search experience. This feature is powered by Goggles, a technology that enables users to create, apply, and share custom filters to change the way results are ranked.
“Rerank enables users to easily adjust search results according to their preferences, explicitly, while being in full control. No opaque personalization is done by unknown algorithms, as Rerank puts users in charge of their search experience,” said Arjaldo Karaj, VP, Brave Search.
The Rerank feature appears as a separate panel on the right side of the search page, summarizing search results for a given search term and allowing users to upvote or downvote certain websites to tune their search results.
To use the tool on a search results page, click the Rerank icon on the top right, and simply thumbs up or down a domain to increase or decrease its presence or absence respectively in your results.
For users who wish to switch between pre-made reranking configurations, default Goggles can be applied by navigating to the Goggles tab alongside Images, Videos, and News tabs on the search results page (SERP).
"Use of Rerank will not change domain presence or ranking for other users or on Brave Search as a whole—Rerank only applies for the users who choose to use the feature, and only on that user’s device," Brave wrote in a blog announcing the tool. "Rerank does not track users, and modifications can be cleared at any time in the search settings."
Goggles, the technology behind Rerank, was first introduced to Brave Search in June 2022, and it gives users the ability to create and share custom filters, such as “News from the left” or “Tech blogs”, to counter any intrinsic biases in the algorithm.
Brave Search is a privacy-oriented search engine that uses a personal web index to create search results, and it does not profile its users or use opaque personalization algorithms, making it a unique alternative to other search engines.
Rerank is available to Brave Search users for free.