Brave Search said Thursday that it is adding a new feature called Rerank that will allow users to tune search results by upvoting or downvoting certain websites.
The feature, which will be available to all users, will appear on the top right of the search results page. When users open the panel, they will be able to “raise” or “discard” a domain by clicking on the thumbs up or the thumbs down sign. Brave will then tweak searches by prioritizing results from upvoted sites and ignoring the results from the downvoted ones.
Brave said that its AI-powered answers feature will also note these changes made by users and source some search results accordingly while summarizing answers.
The Rerank feature will get people out of the one-size-fits-all approach of search engines, the company claims.
“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,” Brave’s VP for Search, Arjaldo Karaj, said in a statement.
In 2022, Brave debuted a feature called Goggles to filter results by predefined filters such as “News from the left,” “News from the right,” and “Tech blogs”. Over time, developers have built their own Goggles that you can search from the marketplace.
Brave said the new Rerank feature is powered by Goggles, not replacing them, and is trying to make personalization simple.
Google only allows users to search results from a particular site by using “Site:xyz.com” in queries. Similarly, Brave’s new option could be helpful for people who may prefer referencing certain sites for specific topics.
Brave said that its search product is currently serving more than 38 million queries daily and over 1.2 billion queries monthly.