This post was authored by The Microsoft Cognitive Services Team.
Microsoft Cognitive Services enables developers to augment the next generation of applications with the ability to see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret needs using natural methods of communication.
Today, we are announcing the general availability of Bing Custom Search API and Bing Search API v7. Showcased at Microsoft Ignite 2017 just last month, these APIs are now both available on the Azure Portal.
“We’re excited to bring to market this big Bing APIs release that includes new features, faster performance and new APIs. By leveraging the power of Bing AI connected with Azure, we can empower every developer to build richer experiences harnessing the power of Bing AI.” -Gurpreet Singh Pall, VP, Bing and Cortana Product Ecosystem
Let’s dive into the features and how to get to started.
Bing Custom Search lets you create a highly-customized and targeted web search experience to deliver more relevant results from your targeted web space, through a commercial grade service.
We listened to your feedback about the preview version we announced at Build 2017 and addressed the need for customized search solutions with Bing Custom Search. Businesses of any size, hobbyists and entrepreneurs can design and deploy web search applications for any possible scenario.
For example, Amicus has recently released a platform that changes the way charitable aid is funded and delivered, showing donors where every dollar is spent and giving non-profits real-time tools to report and measure performance. This allows donors to fund ‘projects’ instead of blindly giving money to an organization, and non-profits to build project requests based on measurable outcomes. This transition presented a very unique challenge: how to enable donors to research and learn about the projects and activities performed by non-profits? Amicus needed to help donors learn, find and fund projects that were of interest and relevant to them, something too complicated for traditional search engines.
With Bing Custom Search, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Amicus has been able to identify its own set of relevant web pages in advance: when users have a single concept of interest (like ‘water’, ‘education’ or ‘India’), Bing Custom Search is able to deliver highly relevant results in the context of global aid.
“This is exactly what our audience needs in order to learn about a broader range of important work performed by relief organizations, beyond those the donors currently know about. Bing Custom Search, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, delivers a ‘Learn and Find’ experience in ways never before possible.” – says Beth Katz, Chief Product Officer at Amicus.
For more information about Bing Custom Search general availability pricing and included quantities for the Trial Tier, please visit the Bing Custom Search Pricing page.
For more information about preview keys you might have, please refer to the related documentation.
We’re also excited to announce the general availability of Bing Search APIs v7, which allows you to bring the immense knowledge of the planet to your applications. Results come back fast with improved performance for queries on the Bing Web Search API.
We are pleased to announce several new updates to the program including new sorting and filtering options for finding specific results in trending topics or image searches, better error messages to ease troubleshooting and improve problem query diagnosis, and updated documentation to make it easier to bring the power of Bing Search APIs to your applications.
The v7 of Bing APIs include the following services:
- Bing Web Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) offers enhanced search details from billions of web documents.
- Bing Image Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) includes thumbnails, full image URLs, publishing website info, image metadata, and more.
- Bing Video Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) includes useful metadata such as the creator, encoding format, video length, view count, and more.
- Bing News Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) includes authoritative images of the news article, related news and categories, trending topics, provider information, article URLs, and dates images were added.
- Bing Autosuggest API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) helps users complete queries faster by adding intelligent type-ahead capabilities to an app or website.
- Bing Spell Check API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) helps correct spelling errors, recognizing the difference among names, brand names, and slang, and understanding homophones as they’re being typed.
Please check out the documentation, migration guide and pricing links listed above which will help you better understand how to handle the existing v5 keys and migrate from API v5 to API v7.
For questions or feedback please visit Stack Overflow and Azure Support.
-The Microsoft Cognitive Services Team
