Brave Search Engine Officially Cuts Ties With Bing, Wants Nothing to do with Big Tech
By Ethan Huff
From now on, the privacy-focused search engine Brave Search will no longer use Bing or any other third-party indexes because of rampant censorship.
As part of an effort to stop relying on any technology solutions controlled by what has come to be known as Big Tech, Brave Search will instead use its own solutions exclusively to ensure users are given full and accurate search results, no matter the topic or query.
“By default, Brave Search users will now receive 100% of results from the Brave Index, giving users fully independent results,” Brave announced in a blog post. “As always, our results will preserve user privacy.”
First launched in 2021, Brave Search is an extension of the Brave web browser, which is marketed as a “private search engine.” Up until now, Brave Search relied on other indexes for about 13 percent of user search queries, though last year the company was able to trim that figure down to just 7 percent.
Now, 0 percent of Brave Search results come from outside indexes. This was made possible using tools such as the Web Discovery Project, which allows Brave browser users to send anonymous data to the company to help develop Brave’s internal index.
(Related: Back in summer of 2020, Microsoft publicly admitted that its Bing search engine censors search results in order to promote “equality.”)
DuckDuckGo, which still relies on Big Tech, pales in comparison to Brave Search
Brave also announced the launch of its own search API, though further details on that have yet to be released.
“Since its launch, privacy-preserving Brave Search has been the only global, independent alternative to serve results almost exclusively from its own index,” the company further revealed.
“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.”
In less than one year, Brave Search’s global independence score increased from 87 percent to 93 percent. This was made possible through the following:
• The rapid adoption of Brave Search, which now averages about 22 million search queries per day, making it the fastest growing search engine since the launch of Bing.
• The broad adoption of the Web Discovery Project, which allows users to anonymously contribute browsing data to the ever-growing Brave Search index. The result is that Brave Search results now have “the nuance and completeness needed to compete on both privacy and quality.”
“Together, these achievements allowed us to accelerate this milestone of 100% independence,” Brave proudly announced.
What really pushed Brave to make this move was growing uncertainty over the future of the Bing API, which became even more of a question without an answer after Microsoft launched a partnership with OpenAI.
“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,” Brave said.
“This created undue pressure for search engines that rely partly or fully on the Bing Search API. The consequences of their reliance on Bing will play out in the following months when their long term contracts expire.”
“Thankfully (and unlike other search alternatives), Brave had both an independent index, and a built-in delivery mechanism (the Brave browser) to continue improving the Brave Search index.”
If you have yet to discover the Brave search engine, be sure to check it out and see for yourself the benefits it offers. It works quite well and offers complete and total privacy, unlike pretty much all other alternatives.
Original Source: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/brave-search-engine-officially-cuts-ties-with-bing-wants-nothing-to-do-with-big-tech/
