Brave just announced that it is now exclusively using its own index for its search engine. In other words, it doesn’t rely on third-party solutions like Bing anymore.
When the company launched Brave Search in 2021, it mentioned that it relied on other providers for nearly 13% of its queries. A year later, that number was slashed to 7%.
“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,” Brave said in a blog post.
The company said that things like the Web Discovery Project — which let people who use Brave’s web browser contribute anonymous data to build Brave’s index — helped it push towards self-reliance. Plus, Brave was concerned about the future of the Bing API — especially after Microsoft’s strengthened its partnership with OpenAI and announced a significant increase in API pricing