Specific details, images or news articles can easily get lost between promoted posts and SEO-boosted content. But one company aims to change that by letting you decide the sources for your results. Read on to find out how you can customize search results and how it is different from Google.
Here’s the backstory
Letting users customize their search results almost seems counterproductive to content discovery and monetization. But Brave is more focused on delivering results that matter the most than feeding answers that don’t benefit you. That’s why the company rolled out a beta version of the cleverly-named Goggles. Working through the Brave search engine, Goggles lets you “search without limits” by customizing where results are pulled from and how many are displayed on the page. To use Goggles, open Brave Search, enter your question or topic and click on Goggles in the top menu, between Videos and Info. In a blog post, Brave explains that the function “will enable anyone, or any community of people, to create sets of rules and filters to constrain the searchable space or alter the ordering of search results.”
What this means for you
To put everything in a concise nutshell, you can filter out online sources or websites from your search. For example, when you search for anything on Google but want to omit a phrase or website, you can use the minus symbol followed by the word, e.g., “tech news -Canada.” But there is a problem with that. You have to do it for every word, phrase or website. But with Brave’s Goggles feature, you can create a custom rule for search results that only include specific sources. So it’s kind of the reverse of how other search engines work. Here are the search results for “Apple” when using Brave’s regular browsing method. And here are the search results for “Apple” through the Tech blog Goggles. You can immediately see that Goggles strips out the unnecessary results. It only delivers content from websites listed during the creation process. Of course, anybody can create a custom set of search rules. But, you’ll need some coding knowledge to get it off the ground. With that said, there are some Goggles already created by the Brave community that you can use. The function is still in beta testing, so while there aren’t many Goggles now, that will quickly change in the future.
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