Today we’re excited to announce Rerank on Brave Search, a simple yet powerful feature to customize search rankings by boosting or removing domains from search results.

Rerank allows users to tweak the one-size-fits-all ranking of search engines with their own explicit input, providing a more transparent personalization compared to other more opaque forms of personalization that neither help with algorithmic transparency nor user privacy. Rerank is available for free and available for all searches made on search.brave.com.

Make Brave Search your own with Rerank

The new Rerank feature introduces a panel on the search results page to give individual users more control over the presence and ranking order of the websites they see in Brave Search. The panel lists domains, each with the option to thumbs up (raise) or thumbs down (discard) the domains from the results. From that point forward, raised domains will be boosted higher up in the rankings a user sees, while discarded domains will no longer be included among the results. A domain’s up-rank or down-rank can be adjusted or undone at any time.

“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.”

– Arjaldo Karaj, VP, Brave Search

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. Rerank does this while upholding Brave’s industry-leading privacy promises. Rerank does not track users ¹, and modifications can be cleared at any time in the search settings.

When and how to use Rerank

Rerank expands Brave’s mission of a user-first Web. Use of a search engine is personal and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t always best. Consider a professional interior designer who scours the Web for inspiration to support their work. They may not get much value from sites that publish content for personal DIY projects. Thanks to Rerank, they can now discard unwanted sites and curate a more tailored set of domains for their professional needs. If that same interior designer is a paid subscriber to some online decor magazines, they could use Rerank to boost results from those sites.

Answer with AI, the Brave Search generative-AI feature that provides concise answers to question-like queries, will also benefit from Rerank modifications. When changes are made to the user’s own search rankings, Answer with AI will source some (though not all) of the information it uses to generate answers from these newly-modified search results.

Personalized search at Brave offers multiple options

Goggles, the technology powering Rerank, were first introduced to Brave Search in June 2022. Goggles gives you a way to create, apply and share custom filters that change the way results are ranked. Examples of Goggles include  “News from the left,” “News from the right,” and “Tech blogs”.

Goggles are one of several ways Brave ensures algorithmic transparency and openness in search. We don’t editorialize Brave Search, but all search engines have unique intrinsic biases that result from data and algorithmic choices. Goggles empowers users to counter any intrinsic biases in the algorithm and allows anyone to create search use-cases that may be niche for an all-purpose search engine. The community of Brave Search users can create a Goggle, and “publish” it for any other Brave Search user to use, or even copy-and-modify for their own preferences.

Rerank isn’t a replacement for Goggles, but rather a faster, more accessible way for individual users—regardless of technical ability—to achieve a similar result.

For those interested in switching 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). Brave also lists popular Goggles, surfaces an open repository of Goggles made by the Brave community, and has guides for users to make and submit their own.

About Brave Search

Brave Search is the fastest growing independent search engine since Bing. Unlike Big Tech search engines, Brave Search doesn’t profile its users. And unlike supposedly alternative engines, Brave Search serves results from an independent index of the Web. This means Brave Search can offer both industry-leading privacy and an effective counter to the bias and censorship prevalent in Big Tech’s personalization.

Brave Search also offers “Answer with AI,” a real-time answer engine which provides AI-powered summaries at the top of the search results page whenever a question-like query is detected, giving users quick, concise information.

Brave Search continues to reach new highs, serving more than 38 million queries per day (and more than 1.2 billion queries each month). It’s the default search engine for most new users of the Brave browser, which now has over 75 million users worldwide.

Brave Search also offers a Search API so that other companies can power their search and AI apps.