San Francisco, Apr 30 (IANS): Privacy-focused web browser and search engine Brave has announced that it will no longer use Microsoft's Bing search as a source for its web searches.

"Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index. We've removed all search API (Application Programming Interface) calls to Bing," Brave said in a blogpost.

The announcement follows Microsoft's recent decision to implement significant price increases for third-party use of its search API.

Brave called the price increase "unprecedented".

"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 said.

With Bing no longer in the picture, Brave Search will now exclusively rely on its own index, at least as the default option.

"By default, Brave Search users will now receive 100 per cent of results from the Brave Index, giving users fully independent results," the company said.

Brave users who feel that they are not receiving satisfactory results from their searches have the option to integrate Google search results as a fallback.

Additionally, they can choose to participate in Brave's Web Discovery Project, which helps the browser build its index.

Moreover, the company stated that it is planning to release the Brave Search API to power other search applications in the near future.