MevaSearch vs Bing: private paid search against Microsoft’s search engine
Bing is Microsoft’s free search engine, built into Windows and the Edge browser. MevaSearch is a small paid search engine from Poland. They answer the same questions in very different ways, and the biggest difference lies in what happens to your searches.
Two different business models
Bing is free and shows ads. Microsoft’s privacy statement gives a simple example: if you search for pizza places in Seattle on Bing, you may see ads for local restaurants in Seattle. It also explains that personalised ads use cookies combined with information Microsoft collects when your browser interacts with its sites.
MevaSearch is a Polish search engine created by Igor Oprządek and the WebOrbiton team. You pay a subscription, so there are no ads, we do not build user profiles and we do not keep a search history linked to your account. We earn money from happy users, not from advertisers.
Where the results come from
Bing has its own large web index, which Microsoft has been building for many years. For a long time other companies could also access it through the Bing Search APIs, but Microsoft retired those APIs on 11 August 2025 and now points developers to its AI based alternative.
MevaSearch combines results from the Brave Search API, its own Polish index WebAtlas and Wikipedia. When you want to see more, it adds results from the independent Mojeek index. For technical, scientific or book related queries, specialist sources appear as well, including Stack Overflow, MDN, OpenAlex, Europe PMC, Zenodo, Open Library, Codeberg and the CIRCL vulnerability database for CVE numbers. MevaSearch does not use Bing, Google or the AI of either company.
Copilot and Claude
In Bing, AI comes from Microsoft Copilot. In April 2025 Microsoft launched Copilot Search in Bing, which it describes as a blend of traditional and generative search, with summaries and answers that cite their sources.
At MevaSearch, every AI feature runs on Claude by Anthropic. That covers short summaries above the results, MevaSearch AI chat, which remembers the conversation and cites a source for each piece of information, related searches and photo search. Requests reach Anthropic from our servers without any account details, and under Anthropic’s commercial terms, data sent through its API is not used to train its models. AI answers are included in every plan, from 200 a month on Lite to 3,000 on Pro.
What happens to your searches
According to Microsoft’s privacy statement, when you search with Bing it uses your query together with your IP address, your location and the unique identifiers in its cookies. Search suggestions work by collecting the characters you type. You can clear your search history, but Microsoft says that this does not delete information from its search logs, which are kept and de-identified according to its own rules.
MevaSearch keeps account data and service files on servers in the European Union, mainly in Lithuania, with backups in France. Queries to external providers such as Brave or Mojeek are sent from our servers without your IP address or account details. Visit statistics are collected with our own tool, PriviMetrics, without tracking cookies, and MevaSearch is a Polish company operating under European data protection law.
Prices
Bing is free to use. MevaSearch Lite costs 4.99 dollars a month and includes 500 searches and 200 AI answers. Plus costs 14.99 dollars for 1,500 searches, 1,000 AI answers and two extra profiles. Pro costs 24.99 dollars and gives you unlimited searches, 3,000 AI answers and four profiles. The Lite plan comes with a free trial of 3 days, and MevaSearch prices include VAT.
On price alone Bing wins. With MevaSearch you pay for something different: a search engine without ads and without logs of your queries tied to your identity.
Families and businesses
With MevaSearch Plus and Pro you can create extra profiles, each with its own login, so family members never need your password while sharing your plan. For younger users there is Kids Mode, which locks SafeSearch at the strictest level and blocks access to payment settings.
For businesses, MevaSearch offers a separate plan at 89.99 dollars a month. It includes a shared pool of 9,000 searches, 10,000 AI answers, 10 team profiles and VAT invoices issued by the payment provider.
Where Bing is stronger
Bing has a large index of its own, it is free, and it is built into Windows and the Edge browser, so it works without any setup. Copilot is available right in the results, and image and video search are well developed. If you live inside the Microsoft ecosystem and do not mind ads, Bing is a convenient choice.
What makes MevaSearch stand out
MevaSearch gives you a clean page without ads, AI answers with sources, specialist results for developers and researchers, NetKrypton warnings about scam websites, the option to pin or hide domains, !bang shortcuts, dead link markers and removal of tracking parameters from links. There are also separate tabs for images, videos, news, music and podcasts, an app for Android and an interface in 16 languages.
Which one should you choose
If you want a free search engine that is already set up in Windows, with Copilot and ads, Bing will do the job. If you want search without ads, with your data handled in the European Union, without logs tied to you and with AI from Anthropic, MevaSearch is the better fit.
Changing the default search engine in Edge or any other browser takes a minute. Try MevaSearch for 3 days on the Lite plan and see whether you miss Bing at all.