Brave, the company that develops its own privacy-focused web browser and search engine, has announced that it will no longer use Microsoft’s Bing search as a source for its web searches.
“Every search result on the web that appears in Brave Search is now served by our own index,” reads a Thursday post on the Brave company blog. “We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing.” This news comes two months after Microsoft offered some massive price hikes to third parties using its own search API. Brave’s blog post describes the price increase as “unprecedented”.
Brave claims that its Brave Search engine was only tapping Bing for about 7 percent of query results. He also noted that at the start of Brave Search in 2021, it only used third parties for about 13 percent of all queries.
Now, with Bing out, Brave Search will rely on its index in its entirety – at least by default. Users who feel they are not getting proper results from Brave can still choose to incorporate Google search results into their queries as a backup measure. Users can also sign up for Brave’s Web Discovery project to help Brave build its index and a Goggles tool to help with rankings.
Brave claims that Brave Search is the “fastest growing search engine since Bing” and has shared that its average daily queries are 22 million. Brave’s ambitions lead it to build its new search in Summarizer AI and develop its own Brave Search API as well. But Brave still has a ways to go for scale with Bing, which is achieving growth milestones on a whole different level.