(Natural News) Privacy-focused search engine Brave Search has completely removed all its third-party indexes like Bing, and can now rely solely on its proprietary index to completely achieve independence and supply an actual alternative to Big Tech serps.

When Brave Search was initially launched in 2021, it acknowledged its reliance on other indexes for about 13 percent of search queries. Nevertheless, the corporate has since made substantial progress in reducing this dependency, with the figure dropping to seven percent last yr.

“By default, Brave Search users will now receive 100% of results from the Brave Index, giving users fully independent results. As at all times, our results will preserve user privacy,” said Brave Search in an announcement. 

This decision aligns with the corporate’s commitment to prioritizing user privacy and delivering search results untainted by external influences. Brave Search empowers its users with independent and privacy-preserving search results, distinguishing itself from mainstream serps dominated by data-driven promoting models. (Related: Brave Search and Presearch say they don’t censor search results.)

Nevertheless, Brave Search still doesn’t include images or video results from its index. The corporate is actively refining these results’ quality before integrating them fully. Within the meantime, users can redirect image and video searches to well-established serps like Bing or Google relatively than counting on a third-party API. Moreover, users still profit from the browser’s built-in tracking protection even when viewing results from external serps throughout the Brave browser.

Brave Search will proceed offering this selection for individuals who prefer the inclusion of Google Fallback Mixing. Users can support the expansion and improvement of search index quality by participating within the Web Discovery Project and providing precious feedback.

Except for removing third-part indexes, Brave Search has also unveiled its own search API alongside the abandonment of third-party indexes. Although specifics in regards to the search API haven’t yet been disclosed, Brave has promised to release further details soon. This development indicates that Brave intends to expand its search capabilities and open up opportunities for integration with other platforms and applications.

Microsoft Edge is leaking the sites you visit to Bing

While Brave Search is making an effort to guard the privacy of its users, Microsoft Edge is doing the other. The latter has been leaking the URLs visited by its users to the Bing API website.

Software engineer Rafael Rivera found during an investigation that the leak is the product of a poorly applied feature in Microsoft Edge. “Microsoft Edge now has a creator follow feature that’s enabled by default. It appears the intent was to notify Bing once you’re on certain pages, comparable to YouTube. Nevertheless it doesn’t look like working appropriately, as a substitute sending nearly every domain you visit to Bing,” Rivera said.

The said feature was introduced within the Edge browser last yr. It’s designed to permit users to follow their favorite content creators on YouTube and other web sites. Nevertheless, if the feature is enabled, every URL visited is shipped to bingapis.com.

“We’re aware of reports, are investigating, and can take appropriate motion to handle any issues,” said Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, but the corporate didn’t explain how the feature works or why URLs are being sent to bingapis.com.

Until Microsoft completes its investigation and patches the issue, users are advised to disable Edge’s “follow creators” feature. To accomplish that, users should navigate to Settings, select the Privacy, Search, and Services tab, and scroll all the way down to Services. They’ll then toggle off the switch beside “Show suggestions to follow creators in Microsoft Edge.”

Watch this video about Microsoft’s Bing going bonkers.

This video is from the Biblical Solution channel on Brighteon.com.

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