(Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other “search engines” listed here: www.searchenginemap.com
Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher’s interests.
Cons for Brave Search:
Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You’ll have to correct me on this one.
Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.
Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don’t even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it’s cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the “smaller web” and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: blog.mojeek.com/…/search-content-from-substacks-i…
Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I’ve had with them. I just don’t have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.
Lastly, I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don’t use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: blog.mojeek.com/…/generative-ai-threatens-diversi…