Brave is basically Google Chrome in a slightly different set of clothes. So if you switched to Brave to escape Google, you really didn’t get very far.
+++++
I think you are correct about that. A browser is not a search engine, it is an interface to a search engine. Although there are a lot of security and ad/spam issues that the browser can control, the search engine is what counts for me.
When you do search, you get suggestions and links that Google wants you to see. I personally no longer trust Google for that function. There is way too much political bias in their search engine. So much so that the search results are very often unreliable.
So show me a better search engine with an independent database that is free of bias with depth and speed competitive with Google.
My default search, using Brave, is Bing. You can set any engine you want.