When Brave, the company behind the Brave web browser, launched its own search engine in 2021, a small percentage of its search results came from third-party APIs. One of them was Microsoft's Bing Search API. This week, Brave announced that it has now ditched using Bing Search, and its index is now 100 percent independent.
In a blog post, Brave said that prior to this week's announcement, the Bing Search API generated about seven percent of the answers in Brave Search. Besides the desire to completely be free of using info from third parties, Brave said that there were also some concerns about the future of the Bing Search API, due to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI and the use of its ChatGPT technology in Bing Chat. It stated:
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. 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.
Brave has also announced that it will release the Brave Search API for developers and companies who want to access its search technology. More details on this new business model will be revealed in the future.
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