A new feature called Rerank on Brave Search was announced yesterday, which allows changing ordering preferences and ranking of search results to set particular sites to rank higher than others. The feature appears as a separate panel on the right side of the search page and summarises the search results for a given search term.
Brave Search is a privacy-oriented search engine, marketed as an alternative to Google or Bing engines and uses a personal web index to create search results. It uses trackers and detailed user profiles to list personalised results. Brave Search has over 75 million users and receives 1.2 billion monthly queries.

The new Rerank feature allows users to boost or downgrade certain websites from the search results. A thumbs up or thumbs down button for each domain can be selected to change the rankings of future results. This will allow users to prioritise the webpages they want to see more often while sending other less trusted sites to the bottom.
Search results can be adjusted according to user preferences, explicitly and with full control. Arjaldo Karaj, VP of Brave Search said, “No opaque personalisation is done by unknown algorithms, as Rerank puts users in charge of their search experience.”

The adjustments made using Rerank will not affect Brave Search or other users as changes are limited to the user’s account only, resulting in targeted results only for one user account or computer at a time.
The company will not collect data from Rerank as the settings are stored locally and used by the search engine through a cookie not used for tracking. The preferences can be cleared anytime to set Brave Search back to its default settings.
Rerank is based on a feature called Goggles, introduced in June 2022 by Brave. Goggles enabled users to set personalised rules and filters to override Brave Search’s algorithms and provide results. The new feature does not aim to replace it but rather acts as a faster and easier way to modify search results.
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