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Brave Search drops Microsofts Bing index to show 100 percent results from its own Index

Brave was earlier sourcing about seven percent of search results from Microsoft Bing’s index. Brave dropped Bing due to an increase in Bing’s API pricing.

Published By: Om Gupta | Published: May 01, 2023, 10:06 AM (IST)

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Highlights

  • Brave will show 100 percent results from its very own Brave index.
  • Brave was sourcing seven percent of results from Microsoft Bing.
  • Brave users will still be able to use Google Fallback Mix.
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Brave Search has announced that it will now show 100 percent of its search engine results from its index. Earlier, the search engine was using the Microsoft Bing index as a source for about seven percent of its web search results. news Also Read: Bing rolls out Deep Search feature that gives detailed answers for your questions

“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 said in a blog post. news Also Read: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Bing worse than Google but Apple could help

The reason cited by Brave behind dropping Microsoft Bing API is the recent increase in the pricing of Bing’s API which Brave termed “unprecedented.” news Also Read: ChatGPT user base declines for the first time in the month of June

‘’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,’’ Brave said.

When launched in June 2021, about 13 percent of queries on Brave search engine required the help of third-party sources such as Google Search and Microsoft Bing to achieve the required level of quality in search results.

The company said that the rapid adoption of Brave Search and Web Discovery Project (which allows users to anonymously contribute browsing data to the Brave Search index) is the reason behind its independence in the web search results. Brave has its independent index and Brave browser to further improve the Brave Search index.

In addition to this, Brave users who feel that they are not receiving satisfactory results will still be able to use Google Fallback Mix. Through this feature, a user can allow the Brave browser to anonymously check Google for a query where Brave Search may not return enough results. This feature represents the results together for a user and sends the query results back to Brave Search.

Further, as an alternative to big tech companies, Brave is planning to release its own Search API, but the company did not reveal further details about it.

“Through it, developers and companies will be able to build search experiences that compete on quality with Big Tech,” Brave said.