What you need to know
- Brave has been building out its own search engine that until now has been integrating the Bing API as well.
- That's now over as Brave has announced it's completely independent.
- Bing only previously represented 7% of search queries anyway, but Brave is retaining the option to use Google as a fallback.
Brave has been building its own search engine in recent months to take on the might of Google and Microsoft, but in the case of the latter, Bing had been integrated into Brave Search.
That has all ended now though as Brave has announced that its search engine is entirely independent. Bing only accounted for a small percentage of the search queries anyway, but from now on that will be a cool zero.
"Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index. We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results."
Brave's big play, as with its other web products, is privacy. Brave Search is designed as an alternative to Google or Bing. Both were included as part of Brave in its inception, with Bing's API called for search and Google offered as a fallback if users weren't happy with the Brave Search results. Google fallback will be remaining as an option.
Brave has cited various reasons behind its decision to cut ties with Bing. One of these is the adoption rate, with Brave Search now averaging 22 million search queries per day. Another, though, is uncertainty over the Bing API and, in particular, it's cost.
"We feared for the continuity of the Bing service, which turned out to be a prescient concern, as Microsoft recently announced an unprecedented increase in its API pricing. This created undue pressure for search engines that rely partly or fully on the Bing Search API."
The fact Brave has its own independent index means it's well-placed now to make the split from the Bing API without undue effects on its users.
