Brave Search also announces it will launch its own search API to power other search applications in the near future

Summary

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.

Introduction

Since its launch, privacy-preserving Brave Search has been the only global, independent alternative to serve results almost exclusively from its own index. That meant far less reliance on the existing Big Tech options (Bing and Google) than the supposed alternatives—like DuckDuckGo—that are actually powered by these Big Tech APIs.

When Brave Search launched in June 2021, about 13% of the queries required the help of third parties to achieve the desired level of quality across various types of queries. Total independence, however, was a primary goal of Brave, and in less than a year the Brave Search global independence score rose from 87% to 93%.

We were able to achieve these improvements in a few ways:

• The rapid adoption of Brave Search (it’s now averaging about 22 million queries per day) made it the fastest growing search engine since Bing.

• Broad adoption of the Web Discovery Project (which allows users to anonymously contribute browsing data to grow the Brave Search index) meant results had the nuance and completeness needed to compete on both privacy and quality.

Together, these achievements allowed us to accelerate this milestone of 100% independence.

But there was also another