I just installed Brave for Android, and for me Google was the default. It's very straightforward to change to Startpage or DDG, but much more worrying than the default engine is that it does not seem to be possible to add a custom search engine such as one using Searx! That's an absolute necessity in my opinion.

I don't know if Brave supports it, but I learned a while back that in Firefox you can add "smart bookmarks" (I think that's what they're called) where you put a "%s" in the url and then when you hotlink the bookmark it will substitute any words after the bookmark keyword into the url.

I've used that trick to add custom search keywords for multiple websites that didn't have an "official" Firefox search engine.

You can set DDG in the settings, I'm using DDG on the Android version. It's also easy to choose it on the desktop version.

I know, as I said in my comment. DDG is okay I guess, but why is it not possible to use a truly custom engine? I personally want to use an instance of Searx.

Surely it is possible to configure a custom search engine in Brave. I would be amazed if the list was hard coded.

Apparently it's only possible if the search engine supports "open-search": https://community.brave.com/t/is-it-possible-to-add-a-new-se...

None of the search engines that I want to use seem to support open-search, however.

In Firefox this is not an issue and adding a custom search engine there is trivial.

I went to the Brave website and had a look around Friday evening. I have also been using Firefox since back before it was even called that.

Part of me thinks I should make the switch, and then part of me think that I'd just be indirectly backing Google by switching to Brave.

Anyone have thoughts on that?

I will now try Vivaldi, which is also based off Chromium.

You mean backing Google because of Chromium? It's not my favorite link, but I also don't see how Google benefits? Except perhaps by open source contributions to Chromium that can be reintegrated into Chrome?