Brave Search has given up its reliance on Bing for querying search results, instead moving to its own index. The company will also be providing its own search API to “power other search applications in the near future”.
When Brave launched back in June 2021, about 13% of the queries required third-party assistance, which dropped to 7% in 2022. With this change, 100% of the queries are now produced by Brave.
While Brave claims that the move is because the search engine wanted to move towards 100% independence, the announcement corresponds with an “unprecedented rise” in Bing’s API pricing, something the company called out in its announcement. Brave was uncertain about the future of the Bing API, which was made worse by Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI as they “feared for the continuity of the Bing service”.
Regardless, moving on Brave Search users will receive 100% of the results from the Brave Index. These results will preserve user privacy and do not come at the expense of quality. The company reports that the search team has drastically improved Brave Search’s ability to answer “nuanced, long-tail queries” over the past several months.
Additionally, this also helps bolster Brave’s privacy claims as its claims of searching without a trace can now be backed up and proven more easily considering there’s no reliance on any external API for queries.
That said, Google Fallback mixing will continue to be an option for those who want. Users can also opt to support the growth of the Brave Index by opting into the Web Discovery Project and submitting feedback where the search results could improve. Last but not least, Goggles can still be used to re-rank and filter results from the Brave Search Index.
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