Brave is a blockchain reward powered search engine that aims to build a privacy focused experience for its users. They are also kickstarting a whole new revolution that rewards its publishers and content creators with cryptocurrency.

Search Engines aren’t something new, but innovation in this space have come a long way.

In my last blog post “The Dark Underbelly of Google” highlighted the issues with Google infringing privacy rights, antitrust violations, and helping governments restrict freedom of information.

At least now its nice to know that we can sleep soundly at night knowing that Google isn’t stealing absolutely every piece of information from our private lives.

Brave Browser blocks all ads and trackers. The team raised $30M in 24 seconds. ⚡️#Speed

Brave’s Cryptocurrency (BAT)

Brave uses a token based on the Ethereum network called the Basic Attention Token (BAT). It currently trades at around 17 cents per token and is ranked 44 in the CoinMarketCap listing.

Brave plans to use this token to reward its user and publishers for browsing on its platform unlike traditional search engines that rely on the freemium model to first build a large database of users before selling ads to them.

And that’s not all, Brave is making advertising less intrusive and more relevant. How far less is yet to be seen but it claims that having a reward ecosystem built-in allows them to persuade website owners or youtubers to reduce emphasis on making money through ads.

As users browse the web using Brave, they can add funds through their Preference Dashboard > Payments setting.

Publishers who have registered their web property with Brave, will then receive rewards from visitors based on the user allocation of time spent, number of times visited and the percentage of reward allocated.

Publishers will then receive their BAT cryptocurrency inside their dashboard store in the Uphold Wallet. To receive the token and gain transaction functionality, you will need to sign up and verify your mobile device with Uphold.

Meanwhile, Brave is looking to extend BAT on other social media platforms as well so that more creators can make money from their followers without relying on third party sites like Patreon. If you’re a creator, you might benefit immensely from this first mover’s advantage.

How Can I Get Involved?

You can download the Brave Browser using this link here and then invite your friend to use it as well, thereby earning you a free $5 worth of BAT. I want to simply arm with this tool so that you don’t miss out on this new financial revolution that will involve everyone.

After you have downloaded the Brave browser, based on your allocations, the websites you visit will receive a tip from you based on your preferences. The default setting puts websites you spent the longest time on to be rewarded the highest. Of course, you can change this, or even switch off the reward for certain websites.

With the Uphold wallet you’ve received your tokens with, can then be spent anywhere that accepts the cryptocurrency or converted into BTC, ETH or major fiat currencies like USD or EUR.

Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave, formerly in charge of Mozilla believes that users today are not getting a fair deal out the all the free platforms they use. Their private details are being misused, or misconstrued into entering into an agreement they don’t fully comprehend. At the end of the day, there are diminishing returns to using all these free platforms and users aren’t even being paid for their private information.

My Brave Browser Review

There are a couple of glaringly simple things I’ve noticed since using Brave.

• Websites tend to load faster, even on slower one. they display the number of seconds it takes a website to load on your browser. this will be popular with time conscious web surfers and also web owners who doesn’t know how fast their websites work
• There are some complex sites that have special programming that doesn’t load with Brave.
  • These publishers are normally big time media sites that rely on their pay to read/watch model.
  • There are reports that you can’t use it while logging into your Google or Facebook Analytics

The search browser can be set to using the Google search engine, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and lots more. When you first make the switch you will find that you have to fully type or complete full sentences in order to search what you’re looking for.

This Good for privacy, Works you a little harder to type the right strings of sentences.

You can also enable the “Autocomplete” tab to view a drop-down in your past search results which is more convenient each time you use.

With brave, you can instantly add this DuckDuckGo integration to get the full privacy you demanded.

Extensions are limited but you can proceed to request the extension you want for possible future integration.

Accessing VentureBeat for example has over three dozen ads and trackers. Since they’re being blocked by Brave, I can load the entire page in 3.41 seconds, will be faster after it loads the first time due to the browser cache (this also depends on your internet speed and lag time).

Try opening a new private tab, and you will receive the option of enabling DuckDuckGo as well as Tor. The Tor switch, connects you to the Tor network which hides your IP address while you do your thing.

If you’re using Google as your search engine within the Brave browser, Google will still record and track your IP address and location. This gives you better localized search results. However, if you choose DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, then whatever you search will be anonymized.

Here’s the dilemma or trade-off where you have to decide whether you want your data to be stored on Google’s central supercomputer to receive tailor-made searches. Or simply use the Brave Browser to ensure your privacy is fully protected when you want to go off the grid.

Google relies on all your search history to improve its accuracy and relevancy. Google is still a mighty fine search engine that’s hard to replace. Using Brave as the second layer of your daily search routine will help you to maintain absolute privacy when you want to.

Design Wise: The Brave browser interface is old-fashioned. Tabs are blocky. Moving your cursor across tabs will show you a full preview of the tab involved. This takes some getting used to.

Conclusion

My overall experience have been good and there’s lots of room for improvement. As a writer and blogger, this will gradually become my main asset to play with. And with Chrome being so obsessed with logging and tracking everything I have with them in perpetuity, I believe its time to gradually make the transition into Brave.

It just feels a whole lot better when you know somebody’s not watching your every move.

What are you waiting for? It’s Free to use and easy to make some Cryptocurrency if you’re a publisher.