Privacy-focused Brave Search exits beta to challenge Google [Video]

Brave is probably best known among hardcore geeks as one of Chrome’s challengers. But for awhile now, the company has offered more than just a privacy-minded browser. A year ago, it launched the beta for a search engine, too—and now, on its first anniversary, Brave Search has hit a milestone of 2.5 billion queries, with a peak of 14.1 million queries in one day.

For a nascent search engine, these numbers are big. As Brave claims in a blog post, it’s won this achievement faster than Google (who took over a year to meet the same goal), plus run circles around DuckDuckGo. Its privacy-oriented rival took four years to cross the same threshold. Brave Search is now the default search engine for the company’s Brave browser.

In addition to exiting its beta phase, Brave Search is also launching a new feature called Goggles. (Cue many future typos.) It joins another recently announced feature, Discussions, to provide a …