Brave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.
If I recall correctly Brave scrapes the web via their users, cannot be individually disallowed in robots.txt and Brandon Eich is conversing in a pretty hostile manner in every thread about him or his company.
Thank you for your suggestion. I think I've discounted Brave automatically because my brain is numb to the dime-a-dozen chromium browsers out there. I'll definitely give the search a try!