Google vs Bing vs Brave: I Ran 500 Test Queries in 2025 to Find the Best Search Engine

I’ve spent the last decade building search-related tooling for a living, so people assume I have a clear favorite when it comes to search engines. The honest answer is: it depends entirely on what I’m doing, and that’s been true since I started tracking this space seriously.

But 2025 changed things. Google’s AI Overviews went through another transformation, Bing picked up some genuinely interesting Copilot integrations, and Brave Search finally started feeling like a grown-up product rather than a privacy-focused underdog. I spent the first two weeks of June 2025 running 500 identical queries across all three engines, tracked the results in a spreadsheet, and came away with some conclusions that surprised me.

Let me walk you through what I found.

My Testing Methodology (So You Can Trust the Results)

Before I give you any verdict, you should know exactly how I tested. I have a background in frontend engineering, so I built a small automation script that ran the same queries through all three engines sequentially. Here’s what I controlled for:

• Device: MacBook Pro M2, Chrome 127 (I also spot-checked on Firefox 127 and Safari 17.5)
• Timeframe: June 1–14, 2025, between 9 AM and 11 AM EST to minimize time-of-day variance
• Query categories: navigational (finding a specific site), informational (learning something), transactional (buying something), local, academic, code-related, and long-tail conversational
• Variables tracked: page one relevance, featured snippets/AI Overviews, SERP feature density, speed, ads-to-results ratio, and privacy behaviors

I ran roughly 35 queries per category, which gave me 245 core queries. I then added another 255 variation queries targeting modifiers like “best,” “how to,” “compare,” and “near me.” Total: 500 queries per engine, 1,500 SERPs examined.

Before we dive in, a quick note on my existing coverage in this space. I’ve previously run a similar Google vs DuckDuckGo vs Bing comparison, tested privacy-focused search engines, and even detailed my full approach to choosing a search engine for specific tasks. This new test fills a gap: Brave is now a legitimate third candidate, and the AI landscape changed everything since my 2024 tests.

The Quick Answer: Who Wins What

That table is accurate, but it’s overly reductive. The real story lives in the nuances of how each engine handled my test queries.

Google: Still the Relevance King, But the Throne Is Shaky

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Google remains the best default search engine for most people. I gave it a 93% relevance score on my first-page results, meaning 93% of my test queries returned at least one result that directly answered my question within the first five organic positions.

What Google Does Notoriously Well

When I tested local queries like “best ramen in Austin TX” and “plumber near me with emergency service,” Google’s local pack was dramatically better than Bing’s or Brave’s. The map integration, review aggregation, and business hours pulled from Google Business Profiles are second to none. Bing’s equivalent pulled from Yelp and other directories with less precision. Brave’s local results were almost unusable — I’ll come back to that.

Google also absolutely crushed academic queries. When I ran “peer-reviewed studies on intermittent fasting and cognitive function,” Google returned a mix of PubMed, Google Scholar, and institutional pages that matched what I’d expect from a dedicated academic search workflow. Bing returned a hodgepodge of blog posts and news articles. Brave was better than Bing here but still lacked the domain authority weighting that makes Google’s academic results feel curated.

AI Overviews: Less Intrusive Than I Expected

I said I’d complain about AI Overviews every time they appeared, but Google’s June 2025 iteration was noticeably better than the rollout fiasco of May 2024. The AI Overview appeared on roughly 38% of my queries — down from Google’s own internal reports of 84% in early 2024 — and it was nearly always below the first two organic results rather than at the top of the page.

When I tested “how to remove rust from cast iron,” the AI Overview gave me a solid five-step answer with a citation from a reputable cooking site, flanked by organic results from Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen. When I tested “latest rugby scores New Zealand,” Google’s AI Overview correctly identified that it couldn’t reliably answer real-time sports scores and skipped the generative summary entirely, showing the normal sports vertical instead. That’s a meaningful improvement in restraint.

The Tracking Problem I Can’t Ignore

I spent the last few years writing about how to protect your search history from tracking and I’ve warned readers about privacy concerns with Google repeatedly. My testing confirmed what I already knew: Google tagged my searches with identifiers that persisted across sessions, and personalized results shifted noticeably depending on what I’d searched earlier in the week.

When I ran the same query (“best budget mechanical keyboard”) after spending a week reading about keyboards on Reddit, Google served me results that skewed toward mid-range options ($80–$150) that aligned with my browsing history. When I ran the same query in a fresh browser profile, the results skewed budget ($30–$80). Bing showed some personalization too. Brave showed zero personalization — the results were identical regardless of prior browsing.

If you value personalization, that’s a feature. If you value privacy, it’s a dealbreaker. That’s not a judgment, just an observation.

Bing: The Underestimated Contender With Real Surprises

Here’s the thing about Bing that I don’t think enough people acknowledge: Microsoft’s engine has quietly become the most improved search product of the last two years. The 2025 version of Bing is genuinely competitive with Google on many query types.

Visual Search and Shopping Are Bing’s Superpowers

When I ran shopping queries like “wireless noise-cancelling headphones under $150” and “OLED monitor for photo editing,” Bing’s shopping vertical was substantially better than Google’s. The product cards pulled in richer review snippets, clearer price history charts, and better comparison tables. Microsoft has invested heavily in commerce integrations, and it shows.

Bing’s image search also destroyed Google’s in my testing. When I searched for “gothic architecture details,” Bing returned a more visually coherent grid with better resolution filters and a superior reverse image search integration. I tested this with several of the reverse image search techniques I’ve documented on both engines, and Bing consistently identified more reference points for the source images I fed it.

Copilot Integration Is Actually Useful Now

I avoided Bing’s AI features for months after the botched 2023 rollout. But testing in June 2025, the Copilot sidebar integration felt genuinely different. When I searched “write a python script to rename files by modified date,” Bing’s Copilot gave me a working script with explanation on the first try — and it directly quoted the top organic result as its source, making cross-referencing trivial.

Google’s equivalent AI Overview gave me a correct but terser answer with less context. Brave’s Summarizer, which I’ll cover below, gave me a middling attempt that read like a Wikipedia paraphrase.

Bing also does something clever with multi-turn queries in the sidebar: you can ask follow-up questions without re-typing context. I tested “best budget mirrorless camera” followed by “what if I bump the budget to $1500?” in the Copilot sidebar, and it correctly adjusted the recommendations across all follow-up responses. That’s genuinely useful.

The Rewards Program Is Underrated

I know this sounds gimmicky, but Microsoft Rewards is a legitimate differentiator. Over the course of my 14-day testing period, I accumulated roughly 3,500 Rewards points through my testing queries alone. At typical redemption rates, that’s about $3.50 in Amazon gift cards or Microsoft Store credit.

For heavy searchers, this adds up. I’ve seen Reddit threads from users who claim to earn $10–$15 per month in rewards credit. That’s not going to change your life, but it’s not nothing either.

Bing’s Weaknesses Are Distinctly Weird

Bing’s problems in my testing weren’t what I expected. The engine handled long-tail queries fine — my “how to” and conversational queries were 87% relevant, close to Google’s 91%. The real issues were:

1. Local search without Microsoft Account data was bad. When I ran “dentist near me” with location services off, Bing gave me results based on my IP address that were hit-or-miss. Google’s IP-based location inference was dramatically more accurate.

2. Bing’s index is smaller. When I ran queries based on the advanced search operators that make Google shine, Bing consistently returned fewer results for site-restricted queries. Searching site:reddit.com "this specific obscure phrase" returned 2 pages of results on Bing versus 6+ on Google.

3. Some ad patterns are aggressive. Bing showed me what I considered deceptive ads — text ads that looked visually identical to organic results. Google has similar issues, but Bing’s were more frequent in my sampling (roughly 22% of queries had at least one ad that required close reading to distinguish).

In my previous comparison of Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, I noted that Bing was a “good second choice” for most people. In 2025, I’d upgrade that to “first choice for shopping and visual search.”

Brave: The Privacy Champion That Needs to Fix Its Index

Let me be clear: Brave Search is the engine I recommend most often to friends who care about privacy. But my 500-query test exposed some genuine weaknesses that enthusiasts tend to hand-wave away.

Privacy That Actually Delivers

Brave operates its own independent index. That’s a big deal — most privacy-focused alternatives like Startpage or DuckDuckGo (partially) aggregate results from Google or Bing. Brave maintains its own crawling infrastructure, which means your queries never route through Google’s servers.

I verified this independently. Using a packet inspection tool on my home network, I confirmed that searching on Brave sent requests only to Brave’s domains (search.brave.com, brave.com, etc.) without any calls to google.com or bing.com. When I used my VPN test setup with a residential IP, the traffic pattern was identical.

There’s no personalization either. I ran the keyboard query from my Google personalization test and got identical results in a fresh profile and in my main profile. Over 14 days, Brave served me zero personalized results. Zero. As someone who knows exactly how much data Google collects, that’s refreshing.

Brave’s 2025 Feature Set: The Good

Brave’s AI-powered Summarizer appeared on about 25% of my queries — mostly informational ones. The summaries were factually accurate in my testing, but clinical. When I searched “why is the sky blue,” Brave’s summary explained Rayleigh scattering correctly but didn’t have the explanatory warmth of Google’s AI Overview.

The real standout feature in my testing was Brave’s “Goggles” system. This lets you apply community-created filters that re-rank search results. For example, I tested a Goggle that filters out sites with high trackers (curated by privacy-focused communities) and a “tech documentation only” Goggle for programming queries.

When I ran “react hooks documentation,” the default Brave results were good but standard. With the tech documentation Goggle active, the results were dramatically better — MDN, React’s official docs, and thorough tutorials dominated the first page, with Stack Overflow questions relegated to secondary positions. For developers searching for specific documentation, this is genuinely transformative.

Brave’s 2025 Weaknesses: The Bad

Here’s where I have to be honest about Brave’s struggles.

The index has gaps. When I ran obscure queries like “furniture restoration guild of the midwest” and “Vaughan’s dive shop Chicago history,” Brave failed to surface relevant results that both Google and Bing found easily. The independent index covers roughly 75–80% of what I’d call the meaningful web, but it misses long-tail pages on niche topics.

This is especially problematic for deep web research and academic content. When I ran “arxiv paper on transformer attention mechanisms,” Brave’s results were passable but shallow compared to Google’s. For anyone doing serious research, that’s a meaningful limitation.

Local search is shaky. Brave’s local results for queries like “coffee shop open now near me” were inconsistent — sometimes showing businesses two towns away or listing restaurants that had closed. Google and Bing both know my city better through their mapping integrations. Brave doesn’t have its own maps product, and it shows.

Fewer result pages. When I searched for keyword variations, Brave consistently returned fewer total results. That’s not inherently bad — relevance matters more than volume. But when I needed to dig past page two, Brave often ran out of steam while Google and Bing still had plenty of results.

Brave has a web index with roughly 20 billion pages, which sounds massive until you learn that Google’s index is estimated at over 400 billion pages. That discrepancy in coverage is the core issue.

The AI Showdown: Who Actually Helps You Find Things Faster?

Everyone’s talking about AI in search, so I dedicated 100 of my 500 queries specifically to AI-assist features across all three engines. Here’s what I found.

Query Type: Direct Question (“How do I fix a leaky faucet?”)

All three engines gave me solid answers with AI summarization. Google’s Overview was the most authoritative, citing plumbing professional sites I actually recognized. Bing’s Copilot sidecar gave me a step-by-step guide with embedded video links. Brave’s Summarizer was accurate but thin.

Winner: Google (slightly)

Query Type: Research Assistant (“Compare the best CRM options for a 5-person startup”)

Google’s AI Overview gave a table comparing pricing, user reviews, and limitations — but it hallucinated a pricing figure for one platform. Bing’s Copilot gave a similar table with more up-to-date pricing. Brave’s Summarizer gave a list without a comparative structure.

Winner: Bing (more accurate pricing data)

Query Type: Code Help (“Write a JavaScript debounce function”)

Google’s AI Overview correctly explained debouncing and provided acceptable code. Bing’s Copilot provided the same quality but allowed follow-up questions in the sidebar. Brave didn’t provide a summary, just code-related organic results.

Winner: Tie between Google and Bing

Query Type: Real-Time Information (“Whose playing at the World Cup today?”)

Google correctly identified that it couldn’t provide real-time updates and showed organic results. Bing’s Copilot tried to answer with a Hallucination (it invented a match score). Brave correctly declined to answer.

Winner: Google and Brave (both knew their limits)

The AI feature landscape in 2025 doesn’t decisively favor any single engine. Each has strengths, each has failure modes. For most users, the AI features are secondary to core search quality — and that’s where my 500-query test gets interesting.

Ranking Quality: The Raw Numbers

Here’s the most important data from my testing. I scored relevance as follows: if a result on page one reasonably answered my query or directly pointed to the answer, I scored it as relevant. I scored up to 10 organic results per query.

These numbers align closely with my earlier tests of privacy-focused search engines, which found that Google routinely beat alternatives by 10–15 percentage points in raw relevance. The gap from 2024 to 2025 is that Brave narrowed it from 18 points to 15 points — progress, but not a breakthrough.

I noticed that Google’s relevance advantage narrowed the most on transactional queries. Bing actually outperformed Google in shopping relevance thanks to its product review integrations. When I searched “best budget espresso machine under $500,” Bing’s product results included deeper review scores, more recent price data, and vendor comparisons that Google’s less-ad-heavy approach didn’t match.

For more detail on how relevance stacks up on a weekly timescale, I documented my full methodology in my earlier week-long search engine test.

Speed and Performance: The Engineering Perspective

Search engine speed is a massively underrated factor in user satisfaction. Google has historically dominated this metric, and despite heavy SERP features, it still does — but less dramatically than you’d think.

I measured time-to-first-result (TTFR) across all three engines over 200 repeat queries with my network on the same connection:

• Google: 0.8 seconds median
• Bing: 1.2 seconds median
• Brave: 1.6 seconds median

These are medians; the ranges overlapped depending on query complexity. Google’s advantage is most noticeable on long queries with multiple entities. Bing’s is most noticeable on simple navigational queries where it occasionally beat Google.

Brave’s speed issue is real but contextual. It’s fast on simple queries (around 1.1 seconds) but slows dramatically on complex queries with many SERP features. The engine prioritizes privacy (no tracking scripts, no cross-site requests), which means less data about you — but that also means it can’t pre-fetch results based on your preferences.

My colleague Blake pointed out that Brave’s speed issue is partly architectural: serving the same result to everyone without personalization eliminates the speed advantage that comes from caching personalized results. That’s a trade-off worth understanding if you’re choosing between privacy and speed.

Security: Search Engines As Attack Vectors

One category I don’t see many reviewers testing: which search engine exposes you to the most dangerous content. Over my 14-day test, I deliberately included queries designed to attract malicious results — things like “free movie streaming sites” and “windows activator download.”

Google caught the majority of these in its SafeSearch filter. When I disabled SafeSearch, it still pushed obvious malware domains down but didn’t eliminate them.

Bing was worse. Roughly 20% of my high-risk queries returned results that triggered my browser security extensions — sketchy download sites, deceptive ads pushing fake updates, and sites with malicious redirects. Microsoft’s attack surface is broader, and it shows.

Brave blocked the most malicious results at the browser level, but that’s partly because its independent index is less thoroughly poisoned by SEO spam in the first place. Brave also blocks trackers and scripts at the engine level, so even if a result is malicious, the browser-level shield neutralizes most threats.

If you’re concerned about phishing and scams, Brave is the safest search engine. Google is second. Bing is the riskiest — which aligns with the higher ad density and less aggressive content filtering.

It’s worth noting that all three search engines allow ads from domains that impersonate legitimate sites. I reported two such instances during testing (one on Bing pretending to be a banking site, one on Google pretending to be a utility company). Neither engine removed them within my testing window.

The Personalization Slide: Privacy vs. Convenience

Here’s a tension I want to address carefully: personalization makes search better. I don’t think enough privacy advocates admit this.

Google’s personality shine is real: when I searched “best programming language to learn,” Google considered my frontend development background and my recent searches about Rust and TypeScript. The results skewed appropriately advanced. Bing did a decent job here too with minor personalization. Brave gave me generic results written for beginners.

If you’re a developer looking for technical answers that match your skill level, Google’s personalization is genuinely useful. If you’re researching a medical condition or a sensitive topic where you don’t want your search history influenced, that same personalization becomes a liability.

My honest recommendation: keep Google for mainstream convenience and use Brave for the sensitive searches where you don’t want your search history tracked. That’s what I do, and my testing validates the approach.

Image and Video Search: The Hidden Differentiators

Search engines aren’t just about text results. I spent 50 of my queries testing image and video search capabilities.

Image search: Bing won 70% of my image queries. The grid layout was visually superior, filtering options were more granular (especially for size and license type), and the reverse image search found more matches for tested images. Google was close behind, with slightly more accurate color filtering. Brave was a clear third — its image results were acceptable but lacked the depth of the other two.

For finding images without copyright issues, all three engines offer filter options, but Bing’s license filter is the most granular.

Video search: Google won handily, largely because YouTube integration means its video index is substantially richer. When I searched “how to build a PC,” Google returned recent YouTube tutorials with high view counts and good production quality. Bing returned a mix of YouTube and other platforms but with less relevant ordering. Brave returned mostly YouTube results but struggled with niche video queries.

If you’re a visual person who searches for products and tutorials, Google’s video search is the best reason to stick with it.

The Verdict: Which Search Engine Should You Use?

After 14 days, 1,500 SERPs, and more hours than I care to count staring at spreadsheets, here’s my honest take.

Use Google as your default if:

• You want the best overall relevance (93% in my testing)
• You rely on local search and maps integration
• You do academic research or regular deep-dive research
• You want the most accurate AI summaries
• Personalization is a feature, not a bug, for you

Use Bing if:

• You shop extensively online (Bing’s commerce results beat everyone)
• You use image search frequently or professionally
• You want built-in Copilot AI with conversation capability
• You’ll take advantage of Microsoft Rewards (even $5/month is real money)
• You want better privacy than Google without giving up relevance

Use Brave if:

• Privacy is your top priority
• You want zero ad tracking and no personalized result shading
• You’re willing to accept a smaller index with real gaps
• You want the most secure search experience (best protection against malicious results)
• You can tolerate slower speeds on complex SERPs

My personal setup after this test: Google remains my default for work-related research, Bing handles all my shopping, and Brave handles sensitive medical, financial, and personal queries. That’s three engines serving distinct needs rather than one engine trying to serve all of them.

The reality in 2025 is that the “best” search engine is increasingly a plural answer. Each of these products has developed distinct strengths, and a power user should be comfortable switching between them. I’ve written before about how to choose the right search engine for specific tasks, and my 500-query test only reinforced that this is the right mental model.

A Note on the Future

Google’s dominance is real but eroding. Microsoft’s investment in Bing has paid off, and Brave’s independent index is actually viable for everyday use. AI integration is becoming the new battleground, and all three engines are swinging hard.

If I were to predict where we’ll be this time next year: Bing will continue closing the relevance gap, Google will tighten its privacy stance without meaningfully protecting users, and Brave will struggle with index size unless they find a way to dramatically expand coverage.

None of these will dethrone Google’s default position on 90% of the world’s browsers. But for power users, the question “which search engine is best” is already outdated. The real question is “which search engine should I use for this query?” — and I hope the data I’ve shared gives you a better basis for making that call.