Brave Search Ditches Bing, Goes Solo

Brave announced today that it no longer uses Bing in Brave Search, making the service 100 percent independent of Big Tech.

“Every web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index,” the company said. “We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7 percent of query results.”

Brave launched Brave Search in June 2021 after acquiring the privacy-focused Tailcat search engine a few months earlier. In October 2021, it removed Google Search as the default search engine in its flagship web browser, replacing it with Brave Search. But it has, to date, relied somewhat on results from Bing as well as its own index: at its initial launch, about 13 percent of all Brave Search results were delivered via Bing.

But Brave always intended to make its search service independent from Big Tech and today they finally achieved that. With 22 million daily queries, Brave Search is the fastest-growing search engine since Bing—which launched back in 2009—and its opt-in Web Discovery Project functionality has been broadly adopted enough to help make Brave Search more competitive. (The Web Discovery Project lets users contribute anonymous data about searches to help build the Brave Search index.)

Brave also cited concerns with the future of the Bing API, which has gotten dramatically more expensive in the wake of Microsoft integrating OpenAI technologies into its search engine. “This creates undue pressure for search engines that rely partly or fully on the Bing Search API,” Brave noted. “The consequences of their reliance on Bing will play out in the following months when their long-term contracts expire.”

Users who are unsure of Brave Search’s quality can optionally enable a Google fallback mixing feature that lets the browser anonymously check Google when its own queries don’t return enough results. This then sends the query results back to Brave Search so it can improve responses going forward. Enabling this option has no effect on your privacy.

Brave also announced that it will soon release the Brave Search API, letting developers and companies build custom search experiences that can compete with the quality provided by Big Tech. It will provide more details about that initiative soon.