Brave Search reaches full independence

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Brave Software announced that its search engine Brave Search has reached full independence of other search engines.

Brave Search's journey began in 2021 with the acquisition of Tailcat's search engine and development team. Brave Software planned to evolve it into a fully independent search engine that would not rely on content provided by Microsoft's Bing Search or Google's Google Search engine.

Brave Search Beta launched in June 2021 and Brave Software started to make it the default search engine in its browser Brave a few months later.

Several new features were added to Brave Search ever since. The company added Discussions to search results, to add "real-human conversations" to Brave Search. Brave Search Goggles was designed to boost or downrank sites to customize results, and Brave Search Summarizer added AI-powered quick results to the search engine.

Brave Search reached a milestone this week. All results provided by the search engine come from its own index now. About 7% of queries came from Bing Search until recently, but all connections to the Bing API have been cut according to the announcement.



The improvement was achieved through rapid growth and "broad adoption of the Web Discovery Project". Brave Search averages 22 million queries per day, according to Brave Software. The Web Discovery Project allows users to contribute browsing data anonymously to grow the index of the search engine.

Brave Software admits that uncertainty regarding Bing's API access were a major concern and driving factor in becoming fully independent. Microsoft did increase Bing API pricing recently, in some cases by up to 1000%.

All search results on Brave Search are now powered by the search engine's own index. The Google Fallback option remains available for the time being. It was introduced to give Brave Search users an option if the returned results did not provide the answers or information the user was looking for.

Full independence gives Brave Software full control over its search engine, and it reduces costs for the company, as calls to Bing's API do not have to be made anymore.

Brave Software plans to launch an API soon, the Brave Search API, which gives access to the API to developers and companies. Brave Software did not reveal information on pricing at this point or whether there will be a free option available.

Internet users have now another fully independent search option at their disposal.

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