Introduction to Bing Search Services

What is bing search?

Bing Search is a service hosted on Microsoft Azure. It offers a set of APIs that let you quickly provide results to web searches just like Google Search. Bing Search can deliver results as web pages, images, videos, news, translations & much more.

These APIs intelligently navigate through hundreds of trillions of web pages, images, videos, and news to provide relevant results that are customized to the searcher’s location or the market.

Different bing search APIs

Azure Bing Search provides a rich set of APIs that can be consumed by any application to provide a feature similar to a search engine. There are six sets of APIs that are most often used. Let’s explore them briefly.

• Azure Bing Web Search API: The web search API offers the functionality to fetch the webpages and their corresponding data (like its URL, a short description, the title of the web page, etc). To consume this API, you need to append v7.0/search at the end of your Bing resource endpoint.

• Azure Bing Image Search API: The image search API offers the functionality to fetch the images available on the internet and their corresponding data (like its URL, a thumbnail image, URL of the web page where it is hosted, etc). To consume this API, you need to append v7.0/images/search at the end of your Bing resource endpoint.

• Azure Bing News Search API: The news search API offers the functionality to fetch the trending news on the given search term and their corresponding data (like its URL, a short description, a thumbnail image of the news, etc). To consume this API, you need to append v7.0/news/search at the end of your Bing resource endpoint.

• Azure Bing Video Search API: The video search API offers the functionality to fetch the videos available on the internet and their corresponding data (like its URL, a short description, the title of the video, the thumbnail of the video, etc). To consume this API, you need to append v7.0/video/search at the end of your Bing resource endpoint.

• Azure Bing Auto-Suggest API: The auto-suggest API offers the functionality to fetch the web search results for a misspelled term or for a search term for which no results are found. The API will suggest the web pages based on their intelligence about the closest search results with the given search term. To consume this API, you need to append v7.0/Suggestions at the end of your Bing resource endpoint.

• Azure Bing Spell-Check API: The spell-check API offers the functionality to perform spell checking or spell correction on a chunk of text. To consume this API, you need to append v7.0/SpellCheck at the end of your Bing resource endpoint.

Before moving on and exploring how to implement a search engine, we need to create and deploy a Bing search resource.

Creating a bing search resource

Now let’s go ahead and create a Bing search resource from the Azure portal.