Windows 10: New Enhancements to Bing Custom Search

Brink · Sep 24, 2018

Today we are happy to announce the release of additions and enhancements to the Bing Custom Search product. These new additions will enable developers and non-developers to further harness the power of the web by allowing them to build an even more powerful and customizable search experience.

At Microsoft, AI is playing a critical role in transforming businesses around the world by enabling more informed and smarter user experiences. We're happy to see a considerable number of websites around the world that are now powered by Bing Custom Search. You can use the Bing Custom Search offering for either powering your site search or building the vertical search experience through multiple relevant domains. We have been prioritizing new features and enhancements based on the feedback received since we announced the General Availability of Bing Custom Search v1 in October 2017. In May 2018, we released Bing Custom Search v2 with important new features like: custom image search, custom autosuggest, and a means for retrieving key insights regarding the usage of the custom search instance.

What's new in Bing Custom Search

Today, as a part of Bing Custom Search v3, we are happy to announce the release of the following new features and additions:

Bing Custom Search now supports Video – Search video results from web sources that have been configured in your Bing Custom Search instance.

More options to fine-tune and customize pre-defined color themes in Hosted UI.

Enhancing the ability to pin specific web results to specific queries by supporting pinning queries that start with or end with a phrase/term instead of only exact matching.

Ability to block specific queries from the auto-generated query suggestions.

Today’s announcements reflect Microsoft’s commitment to make AI accessible to everybody – developers and non-developers, small businesses and enterprises. We hope the Bing Custom Search v3 enhancements will help create an even more powerful site search or vertical search experience and bring new information discovery mechanisms for your users.

Documentation

To learn more about Bing Custom Search API, please visit this link here. For getting started in C#, Java, Node.js, or Python languages, see our Quickstarts. For more detailed onboarding and hosted UI information, visit our Tutorial section.

For those who want to try out Custom Search before a purchase, we provide Free Access Keys where users can configure, tweak and test their instance before deployment.

For questions please reach out to us via Stack Overflow and Azure Support. We would also love to hear your feedback.

- Bing API Team
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Source: New Enhancements to Bing Custom Search | Developers Blog

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Brink · Sep 24, 2018

New Bing features use machine learning for enhanced image search

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On Tuesday, Bing Search announced new features that further use machine learning to provide enhanced image search for topics like shopping and celebrities, as well as a “one-stop shop” of the latest top news headlines.The enhanced image search builds on Bing Visual Search, released in June, which lets you search for images similar to an object you manually selected from another Bing image, say, a purse shown in an image of your favorite celebrity.

“Since then we’ve taken the functionality one step further; now Bing automatically recognizes objects and selects them for you, so you don’t have to manually draw boxes,” the Bing Team writes in a blog post. “You can then browse for similar-looking results in Related Products and Related Images.”

To learn more, visit the Bing Blogs.
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Source: New Bing Search features use machine learning to offer enhanced image search, ‘one-stop shop’ for latest top news headlines - The Fire Hose

Brink · Sep 24, 2018

Build Customized Site Search Instance using Bing Custom Search API

It’s a little over 5 months since we launched the Bing Custom Search for general availability, and we're happy to see a considerable number of websites around the world that are now powered by Bing Custom Search.

You can use the Bing Custom Search offering for either powering your site search or building the vertical search experience through multiple relevant domains. If you believe in delighting your users and want to integrate customized Search AI capabilities into your application, then this blog post is for you.

What is Bing Custom Search API?

Bing Custom Search is an easy-to-use, ad-free search solution that enables users to build a search experience and query content on their specific site, or across a hand-picked set of websites or domains. To help users surface the results they want, Bing Custom Search provides a simple web interface where users can control ranking specifics and pin or block responses to suit their needs.

Our goal is to empower both developers and non-developers to harness the power of the web by allowing them to build a customized search engine experience. Setting up a custom search instance is easy and quick. For customers who don’t have resources to invest in development efforts, we offer an easy to use Hosted UI solution at no additional cost.

Bing Custom Search API – Key Points

Ads-free search experience for your website.

Complete control over which domains, subsites, or webpages to surface results from. This will enable you to build a tailored search experience for different topics for any industry type (e.g., health, entertainment, retail, finance etc.) that your application demands.

Ability to block, pin, promote, demote, and boost search results.

Ability to upload domains of your interest in a batch.

Leverage auto spell correction feature to accurately correct spelling and display the right results to your users.

Ability to rename, clone and delete an instance.

Flexibility to use either an API Endpoint to retrieve JSON response or use our free Hosted UI for your search experience.

Free access keys to explore, tweak, and configure your search instance followed by a pay-as-you-go subscription.

Trusted indexing and relevance capabilities of Bing.

How it works

Bing Custom Search leverages the powerful indexing and relevance capabilities of the Bing search engine while allowing users to customize their search experience. Whether you're building a site-search engine or trying to query content across an industry vertical, Custom Search enables users to control exactly how their search instance operates. Bing Custom Search leverages Bing to index content, so no matter how information is stored or hosted, if it’s publicly available on the web, we can find it. Bing Custom Search can be used in few effortless self-explanatory steps as follows:

Check out our Channel 9 video to see how you can create a new Custom Search instance in minutes:

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Also, please refer to this link for the step-by-step process for creating a custom search instance.

Documentation

To learn more about Bing Custom Search API, please visit this link here. For getting started in C#, Java, Node.js, or Python languages, see our Quickstarts. For more detailed onboarding and hosted UI information, visit our Tutorialsection. Also, please watch our short online demo about Bing Custom Search API .

For those who want to try out Custom Search before a purchase, we provide Free Access Keys where users can configure, tweak and test their instance before deployment. Leverage Bing Custom Search to build delightful search experience for your users. We are working to launch a handful of new capabilities and flexibility in pricing in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.

For questions or feedback please reach out to us via Stack Overflow and Azure Support. We would also love to hear your feedback.

- Bing Team
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Source: Bing Custom Search: Build a Customized Site Search Experience in Just a Few Minutes | Developers Blog

Brink · Sep 24, 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

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