Never knew that, thanks for the correction.

I stand corrected!

Brave products are not open source. Not their search, and not the browser. Your post wording seems to imply that it is.

Well they were dishonest about the product behavior in multiple cases, such as adding referral links to search results. That makes it a bad product.

I don’t think they tried to hide that they were using Google, but rather than they are using Brave, because many people were upset about that. They probably just decided to stop naming specific indexes.