Brave cuts off partnership with Microsoft’s Bing for online search queries.

Brave, the developer of a privacy-focused web browser and search engine, announced that it will stop using Microsoft’s Bing as a source for its web searches. A post on Brave’s company blog states that “[they’ve] removed all search API calls to Bing” and every web search result on Brave Search is now served by their own index. This decision comes after Microsoft introduced significant price hikes for third parties using their search API, which Brave calls “unprecedented.” Despite only leveraging Bing for about 7% of query results and using third parties for 13% of all queries at Brave Search’s inception in 2021, the company will now rely entirely on its own index. However, users still have the option to mix in Google search results and participate in Brave’s Web Discovery Project and Goggles tool. Brave is claiming that their search engine is the fastest-growing since Bing, with an average of 22 million daily queries. Despite their ambitions, Brave still has a long way to go to catch up to Bing’s growth milestones. Additionally, Brave is developing its own Summarizer AI search and Brave Search API.