Brave severs ties with Microsoft’s Bing for web search queries

Brave, the company that develops its own privacy-focused web browser and search engine, announced that it will no longer use Microsoft’s Bing search as a source for its web searches.

“Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index,” reads a Thursday post on Brave’s company blog. “We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing.” The news comes a couple of months after Microsoft introduced some enormous price hikes for third parties using its search API. Brave’s blog post calls the price increase “unprecedented.”

Brave claims that its Brave Search engine was only leveraging Bing for about 7 percent of query results. It also noted that, at Brave Search’s inception in 2021, it only used third parties for about 13 percent of all queries.

Now, with Bing out, Brave Search will rely upon its own index in totality — at least by default. Users who feel they aren’t getting adequate results from Brave can still opt to mix in Google search results into their queries as a fallback. Users can also opt into Brave’s Web Discovery Project to help Brave build its index and the Goggles tool to help mold rankings.

Brave is claiming Brave Search is the “fastest growing search engine since Bing” and shared that its average daily queries have reached 22 million. Brave’s ambitions are leading it to build its new Summarizer AI search and develop its own Brave Search API, too. But Brave still has a ways to go to size up with Bing, which is achieving growth milestones at a completely different level.