Brave Search has achieved 100% search independence, removing the last Bing results in favor of its own index.
Brave is one of the newest entries in the search engine market, made by the company that creates the popular web browser of the same name. Brave Search has a focus on privacy, much like the web browser. Unlike other privacy-focused search engines, Brave has its own web index that has powered the bulk of its results. In contrast, others often return results from Bing or Google and simply strip out those sites’ trackers.
According to a company blog post, it has achieved 100% independence, eliminating a small percentage of search results that still came from Bing.
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.
The company goes on to say that, at most, Brave used content from third parties in roughly 13% of queries when the search engine first launched. Since then, it has steadily improved its own index and reduced the number of outside calls.
Brave says users can now enjoy 100% independent, privacy-persevering results. For those that need it, however, it is still possible to enable Google Fallback Mixing, a feature that anonymously checks Google and combines relevant results with Brave’s own.
By default, Brave Search users will now receive 100% of results from the Brave Index, giving users fully independent results. As always, our results will preserve user privacy. And this independence does not come at the expense of quality: Over the past several months, the Search team has drastically improved Brave Search’s ability to answer nuanced, long-tail queries.
For users who want it, Google Fallback mixing will continue to be an option. Users can continue to support the growth of the index and results quality by opting into the Web Discovery Project, and submitting feedback in cases where we should improve. And users can use Goggles to re-rank and filter results from the Brave Search index.
The company is also planning to release a Brave API.
In continuing our mission to offer alternatives to Big Tech, Brave is planning to release the Brave Search API. Through it, developers and companies will be able to build search experiences that compete on quality with Big Tech. Those interested should stay tuned for more details, or contact us at [email protected].
Brave has quickly matured as a viable competitor to Google and Bing, even incorporating a very useful AI-powered Summarizer. This latest development should help the search engine differentiate itself even more.
