I noted recently that The New Leaf Journal has been blacklisted from Bing search results (and as a result, everything that uses Bing’s index). However, the effects of the still-unexplained situation may expand beyond Bing’s borders. Our fourth biggest search referrer since June 2022 (behind Google, DuckDuckGo [which relies on Bing], and Bing) has been Brave Search, which uses its own index while occasionally mixing results from Google and Bing for certain queries. We have not been blacklisted from Brave. If you run searches relevant to some of our better-performing search articles, The New Leaf Journal appears where you would expect it. However, if you run a straight search for our site name, our homepage does not appear at all, and no New Leaf Journal link appears until 10th place (for me, at least). Before the Bing blacklisting, we were number one in Brave for a search for our site title.
It seems that our homepage was blacklisted from Brave Search at the same time as our entire site was blacklisted from Bing. However, our site is otherwise present in Brave, although we have seen a sharp 50-60% drop in Brave referrals in the 9 days since we have been Bing-blocked. For the record, I will note that I have seen no effect from the Bing situation with other non-Bing search engines such as Google, Mojeek, Marginalia, and InfoTiger. What is going on? My guess is that while Brave uses its own index and pool of results (this is also my impression from actually using Brave), it takes some signals from Bing’s index that it does not publicize, leading to the odd situation wherein Bing removing a site from its results leads to the site’s homepage being removed from Brave. I would be curious to see if other sites banned from Bing have similar issues with Brave.