We’re proud to announce that we’re taking our search API out of beta, and rebranding it the Live Search SOAP API 1.0, to reflect the search engine that is powering it.
This release provides continued enhancements to the original API, from which you submit up to 10,000 queries per day for News, Local, or general Web content. We’ve reviewed a lot of feedback from our developer’s forum and this blog, and have made the following improvements:
- Additional Languages: 中文！
- Search Results: increased from the first 250 to the first 1,000. And added a flag to disable host collapsing (the suppression of more than two results from a top-level URL) to facilitate the development of accurate paging algorithms.
- Search Tags: enhanced to return results as a comma-delimited list or as an array of name/value pairs. Results can also be filtered by the Search Tag name.
- Local Search: no longer do you need to specify lat & lon for location, you can now city names and zip codes, just like in the web UI. We’ve also added local data support for the following markets: en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, en-US, es-US, fr-CA, fr-FR, and it-IT.
- PhoneBook Results: now sort by distance and relevance
- New Code Samples: we have greatly increased the number of samples in the documentation as well as added a new quick and dirty sample Console Application that you can use to quickly experiment with the API, or you can use the updated Windows Forms version in C#.
Check out the SDK for a more in-depth look at the new features.
I know the SOAP API is all fine and dandy for the Java or ASP.Net developers out there, but what about everyone else? Yes you - JavaScript, PHP, Python, and even Ruby coders! What are you guys looking for from a Search API? REST, JSON, ASCII? We’re all ears…
-- Nathan Buggia, Live Search Marketer
