We’ve all been there thousands upon thousands of times, right. You go to the web to search for information on a topic, and you’re presented with a raft of junk, and domains that are clearly just SEO-baiting. What you want is the best, most reliable results, you know, like you’ll find from Windows Central.
Enter Brave Search and its new Rerank feature, which is an absolute game changer. Starting today, instead of forcing upon you the results from the algorithm gods, Brave is going to give back the power to the user and let you customize your own search results.
How? By boosting sites you trust, and getting rid of the garbage.
“Rerank allows users to tweak the one-size-fits-all ranking of search engines with their own explicit input, providing a more transparent personalization compared to other more opaque forms of personalization that neither help with algorithmic transparency nor user privacy. Rerank is available for free and available for all searches made on https://search.brave.com/.”
You’ll never see Google do this, will you?
Rerank is entirely personal. It doesn’t track users, any changes made with it can easily be cleared at any time, and importantly, changes you make have absolutely no bearing on the algorithm. Nobody else who uses Brave Search will be influenced by changes you’ve made to your own results. Rerank data is stored in local storage and pushed back to Brave search via a cookie with no identifiable data. Rerank will also affect some, but not all, of the sources reference if you use the AI search feature, too.
So how might you actually use this beyond just getting rid of absolute trash you don’t want to read? Brave offers the following example:
“Consider a professional interior designer who scours the Web for inspiration to support their work. They may not get much value from sites that publish content for personal DIY projects. Thanks to Rerank, they can now discard unwanted sites and curate a more tailored set of domains for their professional needs. If that same interior designer is a paid subscriber to some online decor magazines, they could use Rerank to boost results from those sites.”
This actually gets the cogs turning on how I could apply this to my own work. If I’m researching a topic and I go to, say, Google, more often than not I’ll end up with a bunch of Reddit threads peppering the top listings. This is fine at times, but I already know when I’ll need to go to Reddit to look for something. If I just want facts and data, I don’t usually want Reddit. Rerank on Brave Search could give me the ability to prioritize the sort of resources I want to see first.
It’s an interesting feature, for sure, and not something I honestly ever expected to see from a search engine. But Brave is determined to push its mission of a user-first web, and I think we can all benefit from a little bit of that.
