Independent index, but still dependent on Bing for some results.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/20/brave_search/:

> The company said in June that "for some features, like searching for images, Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing,"

https://search.brave.com/help/independence:

> Third-party providers

> Microsoft Bing is a third-party provider to Brave Search.

Brave results look pretty similar to bing for me, and pretty dissimilar to Google. I've been using it for a while since it's now the Brave default, and I just doesn't seem to break ranks from DDG/Bing whenever I bother to compare them.