Author – Akash Roy, Cloud Engineer
What is Bing Search API?
Bing Search API is a type of Azure Cognitive Services that provides a fast, simple, and ad-free search experience to the end-users by accessing billions of web pages, images, and videos with a single API call. It ranks the results based on several factors depending on the type of search. There are several types of Bing Search APIs, let’s understand each one of them in detail.
Bing Custom Search
Bing Custom Search gives a powerful and customizable search experience for the content & topics we care about. The core technology works in four steps – identify sites and images, provide automatic query suggestions, apply Bing ranker, and deliver relevant results. With this API, we have complete control over the search results.
Other features of this API are:
- Improves search experience with automatic query suggestions.
- Ability to block specific queries from the automatic query suggestions.
- Enables customization of pre-defined color themes in the hosted UI.
Bing Entity Search
Bing Entity Search enables our applications to find information about entities like people, places, brands, local businesses, etc based on the search query. We can filter results by geographical boundaries as well as categories.
Bing Image Search
This API enables us to:
- Scour the web for high quality static and animated images.
- Customize the search to include/exclude images based on the market, safe search, freshness, color, license, and size.
- Search for trending images.
- Display thumbnail previews.
- Gain insights from images.
Bing News Search
With this API, we can search for news articles and trending topics from several categories and multiple sources. Results typically include a thumbnail image of the article, related news and categories, provider information, article URL, and date of publishing. News articles can be filtered based on the market, safe search, and freshness.
Bing Video Search
Bing Video Search API makes it easier to add video searching capabilities into websites and other applications. It scours across the web for videos and trending videos. We can filter results by freshness, price, video length, and resolution. It provides useful metadata like the creator, view count, encoding format, and more. The results contain either a static or motion thumbnail.
Bing Visual Search
Bing Visual Search enables us to find visually similar images of images found on the web or uploaded images. It can identify barcodes and extract textual information from images to provide insights. This API can be integrated with other Bing APIs such as Bing Image Search API, Bing Entity Search API, and more.
Bing Web Search
Bing Web Search API leverages billions of web documents to provide enhanced details about the search queries. It is optimal for applications that need access to all content that is relevant to the search query. It also provides answers for computations, unit conversion queries, and time-related queries. The features of this API are as follows:
- Location-aware results.
- Ad-free search experience.
- Ability to set the safe-search levels.
- Results can be ranked based on our preference.
- Provides spelling suggestions and related searches.
Bing Spell Check
Bing Spell Check is a fast and efficient API that helps us in identifying and fixing grammar, word breaks, slang, homonyms, and common name errors. It also provides support for new brands and other coined expressions. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to determine contextual and grammatical errors.
Bing Autosuggest
This API provides users with intelligent type-ahead capabilities i.e. it returns a list of suggested queries based on the partial query string in the search box as soon as we start typing. It can be integrated with other Bing APIs such as Bing Entity Search, Bing News Search, and more.
Bing Search API can be used in many scenarios. For example, we can create datasets using Bing Image Search API, Bing News API, etc., and derive insights from these datasets by performing data analysis to improve the organization’s performance. Another use case could be integrating Bing Spell Check API into websites or apps that deal with content writing for spell check and proofing. To get a better understanding of how Bing Search API works, you can check the documentation Bing Search API Documentation.
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