As more and more search engines start releasing AI features to stay relevant, Brave has announced a new summary feature powered by different large language models. The feature doesn’t do anything flashy, it simply presents a synopsis of your search query at the top of the page. It’s available to all Brave search overs on desktop and mobile.

Brave was quick to point out that “unlike many others that have released similar features”, they do not rely on third parties nor will be limiting access because of scalability issues. Brave plans to share more technical details with a special focus on scalability and the lessons learned after the first few weeks of their large-scale release.

This is an image of brave summariser example — *The search engine can summarise all your search results for you. | Source: Brave*

The Brave Summariser was fully developed by the Brave Search team and did not use ChatGPT or its backend systems. Instead, it uses three different LLMs for different tasks:

QA model
Zero-shot classifiers
Summariser model

Besides providing a summary, Brave will highlight relevant sentences in the search results as news articles. Simply put, Brave’s AI models can replace the already query-dependent snippets with a summarised version of those snippets, highlighting the answers as it goes along. This is then shown as a summary of the search result (such as news reports) compared to the main summary, where multiple sources are compiled together for a more “comprehensive answer”.

This is an image of brave search result summary — *Other than providing a synopsis, Brave also summarises individual search results. | Source: Brave*

The feature doesn’t work with Brave Goggles yet. According to Brave, this is because the company is refining its models to guarantee the quality of the input source for user-generated Goggles. More details about whether or not Summariser will actually come to Goggles will be shared in the near future.

This new release won’t generate a summary for all queries, though, and Brave noted that it’s only applicable for about 17% of the queries on the search engine. That said, as the feature gets used more post-launch, Brave expects this number to go up over time.

Additionally, like other search engines launching AI-based features, Brave warned users not to trust everything produced by AI-powered search results. “At the risk of stating the obvious, we should not suspend critical thinking for anything we consume, no matter how impressive the results of AI models can be”, said the company in its press release announcing the feature.

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