It’s about time. I had been using alternate engines specifically for image search for this reason. Although I was grateful that Brave search made it very clear to the user that image searches were being returned from Google or Bing. If Brave hadn’t chosen to make that explicit with a popup, I may have assumed otherwise.

And it’s getting some coverage now:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2019048/braves-search-engine-is-now-totally-independent.html

I find it so interesting how people swear by brave without thinking for a moment that they are a (1) for profit company (2) making “privacy forward” products and (3) no upfront costs for any of said products. if they haven’t already started behind the scenes (I find it hard to believe they haven’t but I have no evidence of such claims), they will have to make a monetization strategy of some kind.

none of this is considering the gremlin that is Brendan eich running the show

Tried searching “monero” and the results are bad but I am sure this will improve over time.

I would like to see brave search become fully FOSS, self host able and perhaps decentralised. That will make it a killer search engine.