Introduction:

This article is a continuation of the series of articles starting with the description of SignalR service. We followed up with a discussion of Azure Gateway service, Azure Private Link and Azure Private Endpoint and the benefit of diverting traffic to Azure Backbone network. Azure Gateway spanned private IP addresses, public IP addresses and availability zones with tremendous control over these backend pool members. We now review a more public internet facing service such as the Bing API.

Description:

The Bing Web Search API is a search engine API with tremendous ability to perform custom search. Indexes are built from HTML, XML and other web content on public sites. The web crawlers can be scoped to individual web sites.  While Azure Cognitive search enabled us to transfer our content and create our own indexes. If the JSON document conforms to indexers which has tremendous flexibility about JSON structure, the document can be indexed, and the search enabled with enhanced user experiences. Bing Search, on the other hand, can be used to perform Entity Search, Image Search, News Search, Video Search, Visual Search, Local business search and even perform Custom Search. In addition, it provides Autosuggest features and Statistics which include call volume, top query strings, and geographic distributions.

The difference between the suitability of Bing Custom Web Search and the Azure Cognitive Search is truly gray area but some points stand out very well. If we just want to integrate applications for custom search, the former is programmatically available with little or no maintenance ownership. The latter powers AI driven enhanced user experience where they matter. Azure Cognitive Search differs from the Do-It-Yourself techniques in that it is a fully managed search-as-a-service, but it is primarily a full-text search. It provides rich user experience with searching all types of content including vision, language and speech. It provides machine learning features to contextually rank search results. It is powered by deep learning models. It can extract and enrich content using AI-powered algorithms. Different content can be consolidated to build a single index. 

The search service supports primarily indexing and querying. Indexing is associated with the input data path to the search service. It processes the content and converts them to JSON documents. If the content includes mixed files, searchable text can be extracted from the files. Heterogeneous content can be consolidated into a private user-defined search index. Large amounts of data stored in external repositories including Blob storage, Cosmos DB or other storage can now be indexed.  The index can be protected against data loss, corruption and disasters via the same mechanisms that are used for the content.  Index is also independent from the service so if one goes down, another can read the same service.  

The querying service supports search experience from a variety of clients and occurs on the outbound path of the search service. The index and the querying service are separate. In this article, we will compare this service with other search services

Bing supports creating a customized search instance using the Bing Custom Search portal where the domain, websites and webpages to be indexed can be specified. Search experience can even be previewed and search rankings can be adjusted. A user interface widget is available to be embedded in websites and applications.

Conclusion: Azure Bing API is developer friendly and provides a robust way of searching custom and scoped content with the same standard as the public internet.