TL;DR: Brave Search has rolled out a handy new feature that gives users more control over their search results. Called "Rerank," it allows users to essentially create their own custom ranking system by promoting trusted sites to the top and sending unhelpful sites to the bottom.
The new Rerank tool on Brave (download here) adds a panel on the right side of the search results page. For each domain listed, you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down to move it higher or lower in future searches on that term. Brave says this lets you "curate a more tailored set of domains" for your interests and needs.
The system differs from most other search engines where users must blindly accept ranking algorithms. In turn, this allows a level of customization not normally expected from a search engine. You can choose to prioritize some smaller niche blogs over mainstream sites, for example.
The company provided an example to show Rerank's use cases:
"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."
The best part is that these reranking preferences are tied to individual accounts. Your settings just live in a cookie sent to the search engine, and are not stored or tracked by the company. And you can reset everything easily if you want to start fresh.
Brave was also clear that it isn't collecting your reranking data to build signals into the main search algorithm. This means you can customize your results however you like without affecting results for anyone else.
Another perk of Rerank is that Brave's "Answer with AI" feature that directly answers queries will also pull from your personalized site rankings when generating responses. This will further customize the AI's output.
The new Rerank functionality builds on the "Goggles" feature Brave introduced back in 2022 that let advanced users create their own filter rules for tweaking the default ranking in various ways. Rerank seems geared as an easier, more user-friendly version of that same idea of customization.
Brave Search has been making waves as a private alternative to Google and Bing that doesn't track you or build creepy advertising profiles. It uses its own independent web index rather than relying on the bigger players. You can find Rerank for free on search.brave.com where you can use it for all searches.