Bing Search API

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. Then we started reviewing a more public internet facing service such as the Bing API.

Description:

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. A customized search instance can be created using the Bing custom search portal. Bing Search API maintains an index for the internet using web crawlers. There is an option for custom search where the same technology for different content types can be scoped to individual web sites. Cognitive search is geared for content from Azure data sources. It can index any json document that conforms to its service across clients and data sources. Unlike the Database search technology offered from database platforms that provide a built-in search capability for the content stored in their databases, the data is not proprietary for Bing Custom search, only the tokens are. Both database platforms and cognitive search can index data very well and the latter provides advanced features for deep learning but Bing Search API is most comprehensive in terms of web content that is indexed. If search and storage must be combined, SQL Server and Cosmos DB have out-of-box features to support this use case and can work well on both on-premises and in cloud. Many solutions use both but Cognitive service can perform advance text and natural language processing with its features for autocorrection of misspelled words, synonyms, suggestions, scoring controls, facets and custom tokenization. The Azure cognitive search persists data only in the form of an inverted index and it provides no solution for data storage. The use case where a data storage might be required to be independent from the search service could include the case where the database is targeted towards the online transaction processing and the cloud service is externalized to adjust elastically to query volume. Azure Bing API serves this space with a collection of APIs from different categories. The Bing Entity Search API returns search results containing entities such as people, place or things. The Image Search API lets users search for and find high quality static images with the inclusion or exclusion of attributes such as size, color, license and freshness. The internet provides a vast resource for news and the Bing Search API includes new search API in its portfolio. The video search API helps find videos across the web and the visual search API looks for similarity based on visual aspects. Local businesses search API narrows downs search based on contact and location information.

 

Conclusion:

With the large collection of resources available on the internet, the Bing Search API facilitates search by content on all public sites and with the flexibility to customize to specific sites.