If you’re concerned that the usual web search engines might be biased, don’t worry — Brave thinks it can help. The company has introduced a beta Goggles feature for Brave Search (itself no longer a beta) that lets anyone set their own criteria for search rankings. You can refine a “politics” query to shift the focus to blogs instead of major news outlets, for instance.
You can create, modify or use others’ rankings just by running a search and tapping the “Goggles” button. You won’t necessarily have to spend time fine-tuning your results, then. A community could also share Goggles to more consistently surface the sites it uses most often.
Brave is pitching the tool as a foil to the algorithms Google and Microsoft’s Bing use to prioritize some search results while downplaying others. Those more dominant search providers say they’re focusing on trustworthy sources of information and otherwise helping users find useful content, but Brave contends that Goggles can help counter biases inherent to its larger competitors’ technology.
The feature may have both positives and pitfalls as a result. While this could help you more easily find smaller sites or differing opinions that frequently get buried in conventional search results, it might also reinforce thought bubbles where you only see content that agrees with your existing views. As with the rest of the internet, you may have to use Goggles judiciously to avoid creating an echo chamber.
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