Major privacy-focused browser Brave is inching closer to offering a individual search engine.

Brave appear Wed that the company has acquired Tailcat, an open search engine adult by a group formerly working on privacy search and browser products at Cliqz. Operating under the majority holding of Hubert Burda Media, Cliqz terminated its efforts on browser and search tech in May 2020.

According to the proclamation, Tailcat will serve every bit a foundation for the upcoming Brave Search — an inbuilt search engine designed to enable private and transparent spider web surfing.

Brave CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich told Cointelegraph that the business firm expects to introduce Brave Search past summer 2021. "Brave is now working on integrating this applied science and making information technology available to all equally Brave Search, first via early access for testers, and and so for general availability by this summer," Eich said.

Brave browser currently relies on major external search engines, offer users the choice between popular search engines like privacy-mindful DuckDuckGo and Startpage, also as mainstream tools similar Google Search. According to Brave, "near all of today'south search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies."

In contrast, Tailcat is built on peak of a completely independent index and does not collect IP addresses or personal data to meliorate search results. Eich stated that Tailcat developers have been working on privacy-preserving search "the final seven years, while at Cliqz, and so on the Tailcat project after the Cliqz closure."

The new announcement comes presently after Dauntless recorded a major milestone in its browser adoption, doubling its active user base from eleven million monthly users to over 26 million. In late February, Dauntless released its "BAT Roadmap 2.0," announcing the visitor's plans to explore the utility of its Basic Attention Token (BAT) for search engines. As function of the roadmap, the firm is besides working on a DEX aggregator and NFT functionality.