Brave made some big news the other week when it announced it is replacing Google Search as the default in its Brave browser with its own search engine. The thing is, Brave documented how it does ranking and it actually said it uses click data for ranking purposes.

Brave documented some of what it uses in its ranking algorithm, at a higher level. These include:

How closely search results match the search keywords (matching to exact words, parts of words, or synonyms)
How recent searches are for those keywords
How often a search result is clicked for a given keyword
How popular search keywords are
What pages are popular or novel
Which sites only allow crawling by the Google search bot

Direct Hit, a search engine pre-2000, used click data for ranking purposes. It didn’t really last.

You can try out Brave Search over at search.brave.com.

I wonder how helpful click data is for a search engine like Brave?

Google has said for years and years it does not use click data because it finds it a poor metric for search.

Forum discussion at Twitter.