At the Ignite 2017 conference last month, Microsoft dropped some important news regarding Bing. Specifically, the company announced Bing Custom Search and Bing Search APIs v7. As we reported last month, the additions are both important for the company’s search platform.
The Bing Custom API was introduced first at Build 2017 and Microsoft has been developing the feature since. As the name suggests, Bing Custom Search allows organizations to create their own customer search experiences.
Microsoft says the technology is based on three levels: The engine will find on-topic sites, the Bing ranker is applied, and relevant search results are found. Cognitive Services was used to create the API and allows organizations to create search solutions to meet their needs.
Ahead of Ignite last month, Microsoft said the following about the API:
“See how easy it is to set up and deploy a highly-customized, targeted web search experience, which simplifies managing site search and vertical search for your business.”
“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,” explained Microsoft in a blog post. ?“Businesses of any size, hobbyists and entrepreneurs can design and deploy web search applications for any possible scenario.”
Users can currently test Bing Custom Search for free, but will have to migrate it to Azure later.
Bing v7
Bing Custom Search is launching alongside the newest version of Microsoft search platform. Search v7 has been in preview in recent months, but is now fully available.
Microsoft says the newest version of Bing Search is faster and more efficient than ever. The company focused on developers with v7, making APIs easier to use.
The v7 of Bing APIs include the following services:
- Bing Web Search API offers enhanced search details from billions of web documents.
- Image Search API includes thumbnails, full image URLs, publishing website info, image metadata, and more.
- Bing Video Search API includes useful metadata such as the creator, encoding format, video length, view count, and more.
- News Search API authoritative images of the news article, related news and categories, trending topics, provider information, article URLs, and dates images were added.
- Bing Autosuggest API helps users complete queries faster by adding intelligent type-ahead capabilities to an app or website.
- Bing Spell Check API helps correct spelling errors, recognizing the difference among names, brand names, and slang, and understanding homophones as they’re being typed.
