What sets the Brave Search API apart?

Many apps and websites have search functionality. To power this search, developers often rely on search engine APIs.

Learn how APIs work more generally.

By using a search engine API, developers can:

  • Build apps and sites with search functionality cheaper, faster, and more easily
  • Access advanced search algorithms and indexing capabilities
  • Generally expect scalability and high performance

But with these benefits comes a certain degree of dependence. Most often, search engine APIs are provided by Big Tech companies (like Bing, which comes from Microsoft) that have the resources to maintain massive search indexes. Some downsides of using a Big Tech search engine API include:

  • Their widespread use creates a dependency on Big Tech across almost all the software you use
  • Shortcomings of search engine API providers—biases, filtering, tracking, and more—persist in the apps built on them
  • With a near-monopoly on search engines, Big Tech can jack up their API prices (e.g. Bing’s recent price hikes)
  • Privacy and security concerns that arise from sharing queries or other user data with Big Tech API providers
  • If you’re developing with the same data set as your competitors, you’re likely to deliver similar results and have a hard time differentiating on product quality

With entire apps, sites, and programs built on search engine APIs, developers have an important choice to make when choosing a provider.

Brave Search and the Brave Search API: a real alternative to Big Tech

Evaluating the pros and cons of search engine APIs (which are almost entirely Big Tech-owned) might seem pointless. Until now, there haven’t been any real alternatives—at least none that provide high-quality search results. That’s where Brave Search comes in.

Brave Search is built on its own independent index of the Web—it’s completely free from Big Tech. The Brave Search index is constantly refreshed with millions of new pages daily via users who opt in to its privacy-preserving Web Discovery Project (WDP) contribution framework. So the index is built on anonymous, high-quality data from real human activity, rather than mindless Web crawlers. This eliminates much of the dead links, SEO spam, and other clutter that gets caught up in other search engines (and their APIs).

Distilling the Web's data Distilling the Web’s data

But Brave Search isn’t just good, it’s also popular: Brave Search is the fastest growing independent search engine since Bing. It’s also the only global, independent search provider with a sizable search volume and a large user base. These users choose Brave Search for its comprehensive privacy and tracking-free search results.

What is the Brave Search API?

Just as Brave Search is a private alternative to Big Tech search engines, the Brave Search API is an alternative to their monopoly of search APIs. Brave’s large, high-quality search index that powers its Search API provides a much-needed solution for developers and their projects—from generative AI to niche search products.

Search engine API Search engine API

The Brave Search API features easy, intuitive data structuring, including full access to the entire index. And it’s available with affordable, transparent pricing—the API is free for up to 2,000 monthly calls, and has multiple paid subscription tiers designed with developers in mind.

The Brave Search API can be used for everything from spell-check/auto-suggest to training AI models. If you’re ready for a high-quality, private, and affordable alternative to Big Tech search APIs, then you’re ready for Brave Search API. Check out the Brave Search API webpage to get started—it’s free and easy to try.

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