He Brave web browser has taken an important step in search of becoming the alternative focused on privacy par excellence. Its developers announced that have removed the last traces of Microsoft Bing that were left on the platform.
This means that the Brave Seeker is now 100% independent, so your results come exclusively from your own search index. Undoubtedly, a very important evolution, considering that the tool is less than two years old.
The Brave Search beta was launched in June 2021, with the aim of providing users with an alternative to the big platforms —Google, for example— that did not put their privacy at risk. And while the company had taken major steps in its development, such as the purchase of the Tailcat open search engine, it still relied on third-party services to function.
In the case of Bing, for example, Brave used it mostly for its image search engine.. But the idea of the developers was to achieve complete independence from any foreign API, in order to offer the cleanest possible experience. At the time of its launch, the Microsoft search engine was responsible for 13% of the results of Brave Search; but in recent times it had dropped to only 7%.
“By default, Brave Search Engine users will now receive 100% Brave Index results, which are fully independent. As always, our results will preserve user privacy. And this independence does not come at the expense of quality : Over the past few months, the search team has dramatically improved Brave Search’s ability to answer extensive and detailed queries,” the company said.
Brave’s search engine cuts all ties to Bing
While the quest for independence was a primary goal for the creators of the Brave browser, there were other reasons behind the cut of ties with Bing. As explained, the recent alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI for the incorporation of ChatGPT in the Redmond search engine generated a lot of uncertainty about the future of the Bing API.
“We feared for the continuity of Bing’s service and it turned out to be a prophetic concern, because Microsoft recently announced an unprecedented increase in the price of its API. This has created undue pressure for search engines that are totally or partially dependent on the API. Bing search engine,” they said from Brave.
But the total independence of the Brave search engine may come up with some problems. The developers commented that by removing the Bing API, certain searches may not return the intended answers. Or there are issues with results that are specific to a region or language. However, they have encouraged users to submit their feedback to ensure that the platform achieves optimal performance.
The evolution of Brave Search in the last two years has been impressive. In fact, it has recently integrated a feature called Summarizer that uses AI to summarize the results of a search in a few words.
Unlike Google with Bard, or Bing with ChatGPT, Brave’s search engine does not include an artificial intelligence chatbot, at least for now. Nevertheless, the company is working on its own language modelso that it could be in your plans in the future.