Brave just announced that it is now exclusively using its own index for its search engine. In other words, it no longer depends on third-party solutions like Bing.
When the company launched Brave Search in 2021, it reported that it relied on other providers for nearly 13% of its searches. A year later, that number was reduced to 7%.
“Brave Search users now receive 100% of Brave Index results by default, giving users completely independent results. As always, our results will preserve user privacy,” Brave said in a blog post.
The company said things like the Web Discovery project — which allowed people using Brave’s web browser to contribute anonymous data to build Brave’s index — helped it on the road to self-reliance. In addition, Brave was concerned about the future of the Bing API, especially after Microsoft strengthened its partnership with OpenAI and announced a significant increase in API prices for the Bing index.
The company noted that users can still use Google Fallback mix – a feature that allows users to privately query Google in case Brave Search has no answers.
In addition, Brave announced its own search API, but said details about this program will be revealed in the future.
Brave tries to use fewer solutions published by big tech companies to differentiate itself. In March, the company launched a summary feature that wasn’t powered by OpenAI’s technology.
By comparison, some of Brave’s competitors, such as DuckDuckGo and Neeva, still rely on sources like Bing. However, the latter is already planning to dump Bing in a few years.
