Windows 10: Bing Maps Location Recognition API Now Generally Available

Brink · Jun 19, 2018

Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability release of the Bing Maps Location Recognition API that we previewed in last month’s blog post. Supercharge your applications to provide users with more context about what is nearby. Given a location (latitude, longitude) the Bing Maps Location Recognition API returns a list of entities at the location. The different components of the API response provide a comprehensive description of the location. The API response consists of:

Business entities situated at the location. A wide variety of entity types are supported (e.g. restaurants, hotels, parks, gym, shopping malls and more).

Natural entities at the location (e.g. beaches, island, lakes and 9 other types).

Reverse geocoded address of the input location, with neighborhood and street intersection information where available.

Type of property (e.g. residential, commercial) situated at the location.

For more details on the entities returned please see the Bing Maps Location Recognition Entity Types documentation.

The Bing Maps Location Recognition API is a high-powered reverse geocoding service that is great for use cases where you want to provide users with insightful details about what is at or near a specified lat/long. The Bing Maps Location Recognition API helps answer questions such as what are the businesses and points of interest near a real estate property that I am interested in buying? What is the address associated with a given lat/long? Is it a private residence? What neighborhood am I in?

A good example of the Bing Maps Location Recognition API in use is the trip labeling feature of MileIQ. MileIQ is a leading mileage tracking app using the Location Recognition API to make it easy for users to label the start and end of their trips. The Location Recognition API is providing friendly names of locations visited by a user in their trip, using these suggestions MileIQ users can easily label their trips.

Get Started

We encourage you to try the Bing Maps Location Recognition API using your Bing Maps API key and explore the useful location data it provides for use in your applications.

For more information about the Bing Maps Platform, how to get licensed, and frequently asked questions, visit our website. Please connect with us on the Bing Maps Forum to share your thoughts and let us know what additional features you’d like to see us support.

- Bing Maps Team
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Source: Bing Maps Location Recognition API Now Generally Available | Maps Blog

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Brink · Jun 19, 2018

Bing Maps Distance Matrix API Launches Today

At Microsoft Ignite we announced the Bing Maps Distance Matrix API solution, a service that provides travel time and distances for a set of origins and destinations. Today, we are happy to announce that it is now available!

Looking to develop a solution for a Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) or Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP)? The Bing Maps Distance Matrix API service assists in calculating travel time and distances in many-to-many scenarios with an optional travel-time histogram. The Distance Matrix API can help answer questions as varied as where a commercial bakery should open their next location to optimize daily deliveries or helping a school district select the optimal pick up locations for their fleet of school buses.

How it works

The Bing Maps Distance Matrix API calculates the distances and times based on the routes calculated by the Bing Maps Route API. Times are based on predictive traffic information, depending on the start time specified in the request, and distance matrices are calculated using different modes of transportation, such as driving, walking and public transit routes. This API can also generate an optional histogram of travel times over a period of time with a set interval that takes into consideration the predicted traffic at those times.

Below is a screenshot from our travelling salesman demo, including the travel-time histogram:

Distance matrixes are used in several different types of applications. Some common applications include:

Sorting search results by their actual travel distance or time.

Determining arrival times based on travel times.

Calculating the difference in commute times between locations. For example: We are looking to move to a new office, what is the impact on commute times for our staff?

Calculating a route with traffic data

Using the Bing Maps Distance Matrix API, you can calculate a route using traffic data to determine a distance matrix based on travel time or distance for many scenarios, such as store locators, job search sites, location scoring, and more.

In the first image below, location one is clearly closer than location two visually on a map; however, in calculating time and distance, the second location is actually a shorter distance away and takes less driving time than location one.

Get started

To learn more about developing your distance matrix solution, using the Bing Maps REST Service, view the API documentation. This documentation includes various scenarios in setting up your solution, how each option works, supported methods, how a request is calculated, and more. Coverage for Bing Maps Distance Matrix API is available in most places where Bing Maps supports routing. For details on coverage, please refer to the documentation.

Additionally, take a look at this project on GitHub, as it makes it easy to use the Distance Matrix API in .NET and also includes examples on how to use the Bing Maps Distance Matrix API.

For more information on the Bing Maps Distance Matrix API, how to get licensed, and frequently asked questions, visit our website.

We are always working to improve upon our APIs and look forward to seeing how people use the API and getting your feedback. Connect with us on the Bing Maps Forum to share your thoughts and let us know what you would like to see in future versions.

- Bing Maps team
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Source: Bing Maps Distance Matrix API Launches Today | Maps Blog

Brink · Jun 19, 2018

Announcing Enhanced Security for Bing Maps API Keys

The Bing Maps Developer portal shipped a new feature allowing you to restrict access on your Bing Maps API keys to a set of domains that you specify. With this feature customers can define a strict set of Referrer values or IP address ranges that the key will be validated against. Requests originating from your allow list will process normally, while requests from outside of your list will return an access denied response.

Adding domain Security to your API key is completely optional and keys left as-is will continue to function as they do today. The allow list for a key is independent from all of your other keys, enabling you to have distinct rules for each of your keys.

Currently we only support exact referrer name matching, meaning if your browser or header request sends https://www.contoso.com/, please have your referrer name as: https://www.contoso.com/ in the whitelisting definition. We will support short urls in a future release.

Note: Wildcards are not supported when specifying your IP addresses. However you CAN specify an IP range.

To set your Allow list, follow these simple steps:

Sign into the developer portal with your Microsoft Account

Select the My Account → My Keys menu choice to show a list of all of your keys

Click the ‘Enable Security’ link for the key you wish to set restrictions on

For a referrer rule, specify a Rule name and Referrer, then hit the green ‘plus’ button to add it

For an IP Range Rule, click to the IP range tab, then enter a rule name and your desired starting and ending IP address

You can continue to add as many rules as needed for each key

Press the close button when you are finished.

That’s it! Note that it can take up to 30 minutes for these changes to take effect.

If you have questions or feedback for the team, please reach out to our Bing Maps Enterprise Support team at L: bmesupp@microsoft.com.

- Bing Maps Team
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Source: Announcing Enhanced Security for Bing Maps API Keys | Maps Blog

Brink · Jun 19, 2018

Bing Custom Search and Bing Search API V7 Now Generally Available

Microsoft Cognitive Services enables developers to augment the next generation of applications with the ability to see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret needs using natural methods of communication.  

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Bing Custom Search API and Bing Search API v7. Showcased at Microsoft Ignite 2017 just last month, these APIs are now both available on the Azure Portal.

“We’re excited to bring to market this big Bing APIs release that includes new features, faster performance and new APIs. By leveraging the power of Bing AI connected with Azure, we can empower every developer to build richer experiences harnessing the power of Bing AI.” -Gurpreet Singh Pall, VP, Bing and Cortana Product Ecosystem

Let’s dive into the features and how to get to started.
 
Bing Custom Search lets you create a highly-customized and targeted web search experience to deliver more relevant results from your targeted web space, through a commercial grade service. 

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. Businesses of any size, hobbyists and entrepreneurs can design and deploy web search applications for any possible scenario.

For example, Amicus has recently released a platform that changes the way charitable aid is funded and delivered, showing donors where every dollar is spent and giving non-profits real-time tools to report and measure performance. This allows donors to fund ‘projects’ instead of blindly giving money to an organization, and non-profits to build project requests based on measurable outcomes. This transition presented a very unique challenge: how to enable donors to research and learn about the projects and activities performed by non-profits? Amicus needed to help donors learn, find and fund projects that were of interest and relevant to them, something too complicated for traditional search engines.

With Bing Custom Search, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Amicus has been able to identify its own set of relevant web pages in advance: when users have a single concept of interest (like ‘water’, ‘education’ or ‘India’), Bing Custom Search is able to deliver highly relevant results in the context of global aid.

“This is exactly what our audience needs in order to learn about a broader range of important work performed by relief organizations, beyond those the donors currently know about. Bing Custom Search, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, delivers a ‘Learn and Find’ experience in ways never before possible.” – says Beth Katz, Chief Product Officer at Amicus.

For more information about Bing Custom Search general availability pricing and included quantities for the Trial Tier, please visit the Bing Custom Search Pricing page.

For more information about preview keys you might have, please refer to the related documentation.

We’re also excited to announce the general availability of Bing Search APIs v7, which allows you to bring the immense knowledge of the planet to your applications. Results come back fast with improved performance for queries on the Bing Web Search API.

We are pleased to announce several new updates to the program including new sorting and filtering options for finding specific results in trending topics or image searches, better error messages to ease troubleshooting and improve problem query diagnosis, and updated documentation to make it easier to bring the power of Bing Search APIs to your applications.

The v7 of Bing APIs include the following services:

Bing Web Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) offers enhanced search details from billions of web documents.

Bing Image Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) includes thumbnails, full image URLs, publishing website info, image metadata, and more.

Bing Video Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) includes useful metadata such as the creator, encoding format, video length, view count, and more.

Bing News Search API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) includes authoritative images of the news article, related news and categories, trending topics, provider information, article URLs, and dates images were added.

Bing Autosuggest API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) helps users complete queries faster by adding intelligent type-ahead capabilities to an app or website.

Bing Spell Check API (webpage, pricing page, and upgrade guide) helps correct spelling errors, recognizing the difference among names, brand names, and slang, and understanding homophones as they’re being typed.

Please check out the documentation, migration guide and pricing links listed above which will help you better understand how to handle the existing v5 keys and migrate from API v5 to API v7.

For questions or feedback please visit Stack Overflow and Azure Support.

-The Microsoft Cognitive Services Team
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Source: Bing Search API v7 and Bing Custom Search are now generally available | Blog | Microsoft Azure

See also: Bing Custom Search and Bing Search API V7 Now Generally Available | Search Quality Insights

Windows 10: Bing Maps Location Recognition API Now Generally Available

Bing Maps Location Recognition API Now Generally Available

Bing Maps Location Recognition API Now Generally Available

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