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Brave Search has introduced Summarizer, a new AI-powered feature with similarities to Google’s featured snippets and Perspectives SERP features. It’s also like what BingGPT is doing, generating answers to questions in near real-time.
Summarizer provides concise answers (generally two or three sentences), with one or multiple citations, to user search queries.
Brave’s Summarizer answers are based on search results found on the web. This is a key point Brave called out in their announcement:Unlike a purely generative AI model, which is prone to spout unsubstantiated assertions, we trained our large language models (LLMs) to process multiple sources of information present on the Web. This produces a more concise, accurate answer, expressed in coherent language.
This answer also includes three original sources (which I’ve annotated in red). Those numbered citations aren’t clickable. Hovering over them will tell you the website this information came from. Searchers will have to click on the websites below the summaries.
Interestingly, Brave doesn’t simply pull the information from the top 3 organic search results. Citation 0 was in 10th position; Citation 1 was 4th position; and Citation 2 was the top organic result.
Summaries are shown for 17% of queries. Brave said that using web results helps Summarizer provide real-time, up-to-date information to searchers. But Brave also noted that summaries are only being generated for about 17% of queries – though Brave plans to grow that number “in the near future.”
Brave’s result snippets also get summaries. Brave Search will also be highlighting (i.e., bolding) answers as opposed to bolding keywords on searches. Brave said:
So instead of just bolding keywords from the search query, Brave is trying to actually provide full answers in result snippets. And as Brave notes, queries can trigger both these summarized snippets, as well as the Summarizer.
Why we care. Although privacy-focused search engine Brave trails far behind Google and Microsoft Bing, it may be worth your time to explore Brave’s Summarizer, to test examples of how it works on various queries. While this particular feature won’t change any of your search strategies, as Google and Bing evolve their AI chat features, Brave may provide some inspiration to the larger search engines.Available now. Brave Summarizer is available today for all users on desktop and mobile. Users can opt out under Search settings.
